The universal language

The police tape saga is a topic of perpetual interest here, but I think this one's a genuine first: the generic "POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS" image illustrating a story from a non-English-speaking country.

A number of other points about the story are worth raising, of course: why it's the top among the day's "top stories"; why "couple" is both singular and plural in the same hed; and why an update that leads with the officially determined cause of death still includes this graf toward the end:

Hotel staff contacted local authorities. The cause of their death is not yet known, but their bodies have been transported to the Dominican National Institute of Forensic Sciences for an exam. The spokesman said blood-pressure medication was found in the room. 

But the generic crime scene tape is really the star of the show. Here's the One Weird Thing You Need To Know about that: Generic photos tend to make people think the writing is worse. (Yes, independently of separate measures that ask directly about the writing.) The effects are squishier and more contingent on perceptions of credibility and objectivity.** If the Elongated Yellow Police Tape has actually become the international symbol of Random Crime For Which We Can't Be Bothered To Find A Photo, though, we've probably turned a corner.

* The AP Stylebook's guidance on this topic is pretty useful.
** Come see us in Toronto in August to hear all about it.

The art of the ... no, don't

Doesn't that just get your Memorial Day weekend off to a roaring start? Five tips from the Motor City's leading daily on how to score an SUV deal! It spoils the fun a little to zoom in and see that Tip No. 1 is "look for deals," but let's go through the list anyway. Subhed and first paragraph for each:

1. Look for SUV, crossover deals
SUVs and crossover competition is heating up with new models like the Kia Telluride, Hyundai Palisade and Honda Passport. That means there are SUV deals to be had as automakers jockey for position.

2. But don't rule out sedans altogether
Look closely: There are still some deals on sedans, but they're more sporadic.
 
3. Don't expect a great financing deal
In the wake of the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, borrowing costs have increased. Consequently, there are fewer long-term 0% interest deals out there.

4. Prepare to pay up for the best
Looking for the latest and greatest? You might have to dig deep to pay for it.

5. Consider waiting a few months
Do you really need that new vehicle now? If not, consider waiting until August or September, when discounting picks up as dealers begin selling the next model-year vehicles.

To summarize: If you want a deal on an SUV this weekend, you should look for a deal, buy something other than an SUV, expect to pay what you would have in the first place, and hang on for a few months.

Stay tuned for those tips on how to win the lottery, kids!

Stoned again

Here's how you can tell whether you are playing the part of David or the part of Goliath. If you are the one being peppered with stones, you are almost certainly not David.

We can at least make a joyful noise unto the Gannett hub that it doesn't say "the story in the Gospels."

Shut up, he unfolded

Did the nut graf in Friday morning's 1A tale about a lawsuit from Ferndale look familiar?

In a he-said, he-said tale unfolding in federal court, retired police detective William Wilson claims he was denied a promotion and forced into retirement as part of a bigger strategy to prevent an African-American from potentially being named police chief in Ferndale.

Maybe it's because you read the front page on March 6:

In a classic he-said, she-said tale unfolding in federal court, ex-Uber driver David Shaw, 38, is suing the City of Ferndale, alleging three police officers wrongfully arrested him the night he picked up six drunk patrons from Rosie O'Grady's. And he's suing the passengers, too —  five of them women — for emotional distress, alleging he was racially taunted and physically assaulted after ordering them out of his car for their behavior.

In the Good Old Days (pre-War on Editing), we could worry about whether whether anyone was still listening to the rule about the Oxford comma, and lessons would be drawn about attention to detail. Mere attention to detail seems quaint now. If the robots are actually going to take over the reporting world, could we ask them politely to search the old memory banks for cliches used within the past three months and EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE?

Please make it stop

Once upon a time, children, some editor working in quiet anonymity on a feature about suburban libraries would have spotted a random relative clause as it wandered into traffic and stopped it. Terminated its command with extreme prejudice, maybe, if it was movie night at the library, but by all means kept it from afflicting readers whose only offense was to start reading in the first place.

Truth be told, of course, we used to lose those battles as often as we'd win them. Someone up the food chain might like the flow of it, or want to lighten up and have a little fun, or complain that boring editors are driving away the readers who will sustain us in the future.  To which -- fine, but if you have to drag your innocent restaurant critic into your orgy of writering, could you at least spell his name the same way he does?

Only one of these things can be true

How many guns, Local Daily Paper?

ARLINGTON, Virginia – Former U.S. Rep. John Dingell of Dearborn, the longest-serving member of Congress in its history, was laid to rest on Friday at Arlington National Cemetery, in a military ceremony that included a 21-gun salute. 

Hmm. How many guns, Other Local Daily Paper?

Since nobody seems to have cranky copy editors who remember these things around any more, you can actually look them up:

The elements of military funeral honors include:

• A casket team (body bearers / pall bearers)
• A firing party
• A bugler
• Folding of and Presentation of our National Colors

... Officers in the rank of colonel and above in the Army and the Marine Corps may be provided a caparisoned (riderless) horse, if available. General/flag officers of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard may receive a cannon salute (17 guns for a four-star general, 15 for a three-star, 13 for a two-star, 11 for a one-star), if available. Minute Guns may be used for general officers/flag officers of the Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps. The President of the United States is entitled to a 21-gun salute, while other high state officials receive 19 guns. The cemetery staff will make arrangements for military funeral honors when requested by the next of kin. A military chaplain may also be requested. 

Which paper do you think got it right?

Not to linger too long here, but there's also the small matter of the cutlines. Here's the Freep (print):

Rep. Debbie Dingell, wife of former Congressman John D. Dingell, reacts along with Jim Dingell, brother of the iconic lawmaker, right, during the burial service with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

And the News (online):

Army Lt. Col. Allen Kehoe of the Old Guard presents the flag from the casket of former Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., to his wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., during burial services at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday, Feb. 15, 2019 in Arlington, Va. To Debbie Dingell's right are John Dingell's younger siblings, Jim Dingell and Jule Walowac, and his son Christopher Dingell.

Both photographers were in about the same place (here's the AP shot from the News):

Who's at right, and who's on Rep. Dingell's right? I'd bet on the Freep in this case, though that's no reason to use either "reacts" or "iconic."

Nibble on they tiny feet

Is it just me, or is an especially morbid tableau awaiting the guests at Mitch Albom's table this holiday season?

Watermarks

You have bigger things to think about on Election Day, but just as a reminder that editing is always in season -- no. I expect what he said was "low-water mark," and it'd be nice if national publications kept people around who knew the difference. We could call them -- I don't know, "edit copiers" or something.

Whose snare of cold command

When everybody uses the same story and no one edits it, this is the result in the local fishwrap. Would you be talking about the sphinx at Giza?

From "Ask Amy" in the same edition:

OK, we had a reformed Episcopalian at ours, but are you sure you don't mean a Reform rabbi?

Waiting for the correction

Sure, everybody types on autopilot sometimes, and step forward the lucky soul who's never entered "D-N.C." after a Republican's name,* and obviously this is the sort of thing that slipped through in the days of fully staffed desks, but still -- do they REALLY all look alike to the copydesk these days?

This appears to be the AP's wording; I saw it in the local Gannett fishwrap, which promises on page 2A every day to correct "all errors of fact." I'm not holding out a lot of hope on this one, but there was a day when even something so incredibly trivial as confusing the leader of one Korea with the other would have merited a correction in a metro daily.

* Or vice versa; the force of habit knows no party

There wolf!

Remember the days when journalists were taught to get the news into the headline and to front-load the lede for busy readers? Yeah, me too:

The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) revealed the identity of the mysterious wolf-like creature that was shot dead in the state last month. Officials confirmed in a news release Monday that DNA results proved the animal was a gray wolf.   

So the evening's No. 3 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network boils down to: You know that wolf the guy told wildlife officials he shot last month? IT'S A WOLF!

We do seem to pick on Fox a lot around here, and for obvious reasons, but the lesson applies to everybody who's tempted by another story about Bigfoot, Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, D.B. Cooper or the Loch Ness Monster. If you don't fall for it the first time, you won't have to waste the space later knocking it down.

Emanuelle in ... wait, what?

Fetchez la vache, Nation's Newspaper of Record:

An article on Thursday about Vladimir V. Putin’s recent opportunities to project his power misspelled the given name of the president of France. He is Emmanuel Macron, not Emanuelle.

Aside from the general can't-anybody-here-play-this-game-ness, my favorite part of the correction is the coy intrusion of Times style. Apparently we're supposed to know this Putin fella well enough that we don't need to be told which country he's projecting his power from, but we still need the "V" to distinguish him from Vladimir D. Putin or Vladimir "Babycakes" Putin or any of the other Putins who came to Casablanca for the waters.

To get to the other side?

Even without the Stupid Question, this is a candidate for Least Informative Follow-up of the (no longer young) Year.  Let's proceed to the fourth paragraph:

Police confirmed Monday that a sixth Ram truck was found around 2:30 p.m. Saturday near Warren and Outer Drive in Dearborn Heights. No damage was done to the vehicle, according to the police report.
 

The other trucks have been found in Detroit, some stripped or damaged, some still in new condition. A pocket Bible was found on the driver's seat of one of the trucks.

Given that the "when" of Tuesday's story is "erm, Saturday," you can see leading with the Bible. (Assuming you didn't want to put any further effort into finding out about an arrest that apparently happened Saturday.) But before putting it in the headline, should we wonder for a moment if the pocket that the pocket Bible fell out of might have belonged to -- oh, a factory worker who parked the soon-to-be-stolen Ram?

On the third day ...

You can certainly see why this story made the front page at Fox. Until you read the lede, at least:

A former Houston Astros first base coach made an emotional return to the ballpark Monday night, tossing the ceremonial first pitch in the home opener months after nearly dying from a slip and fall.

Well, we all let our fingers get ahead of our brains sometimes. But with Fox, you have to wonder why "beating death" is the first thing that came to mind.

What if you had this book ...

... and it had all these words in it, and it told you where they came from, and it was in alphabetical order for your convenience! Right, Nation's Newspaper of Record?

This appears to have been the offending text:

The Bight gets its name from its appearance: From space, it looks as if a giant bit into the southern coast of Australia. The crescent-shaped bay runs for more than 700 miles, lined by the longest stretch of sea cliffs in the world. 
 
And that pesky book with all the words? It gives "a bending or curved geographical feature, as an indentation in a coast line or mass of ice, a bend in a river, etc." from Old English and "a stretch of water between two headlands; a bay, esp. a shallow or slightly receding bay" dating to 1555.

The fundamental things still apply: If you don't know what it means, look it up. If you do know what it means, look it up anyway.
 

Today in attribution

Imagine -- oh, come on, just go ahead and close your eyes and imagine -- a world in which a reporter* could explain what pi meant without having to quote the piday.com website.

You can even leave out the worlds in which people still consulted stylebooks on how to render dates, or in which commas knew their place, though I'd appreciate some word from overseas on how Pi Day is celebrated in those "worldwide" places where March 14 is 14/3.

* Your Editor was there on a fine day some 25 years ago when a page designer (from NC State, no less) caught a Star Reporter leaving pretty much all the zeroes out of Avogadro's number.

Martinis, steaks and cold-blooded belles

So with the UN slapping America in the face, Republicans finally wising up to the Kenyan usurper's Mideast perfidy and Massster's beautiful tax cuts held hostage by those pesky budget rules, what do you figure should have been the world's fourth most important story on Thursday afternoon?

Aw, you peeked. Having done so, though, you might have wondered how the elements of this story fell into place so naturally, so let's have a look:

She’ll drink to that!

The Latvian woman who watched her fiancé drown in the Hudson River walked out of prison Thursday — and celebrated with a martini and steak lunch.

There's no "police said" or "according to eyewitnesses" or "Fox News can reveal" (though there is that delicate accent on "fiancé," in case you've forgiven the French for anything in the past few decades). But there is an outline of the structure under which we're supposed to understand stuff. "Walked out of prison Thursday" is an easy claim to verify. "Martini and steak lunch" is close, but .. hang on a little and we'll get back to the martinis. "Celebrated" is actually a bit different from what you see in sports photo captions, where at least people are usually jumping up and down or something. As for who's drinking to what -- well, you can't call it a lie, because there's nothing for it to be true or false about. It's a framing device. It doesn't tell you what to think, but it tells you how to think about the things you're poised to learn.

Watching one's fiance drown, of course, is substantially different from drowning one's fiance; both have the makings of a good country song, but to make sense of the second paragraph, you need to know in advance that this isn't your ordinary Latvian woman. She's the one ... oh, come on, you read about it a couple years ago, it's on the tip of your tongue, she's the one in that story! So now you're ready to look at how tabloids make news. Indeed, let's just go ahead and shift over to the New York Post, the Murdoch stablemate from which Fox appropriated this story:

The part that Fox added to the hed -- the steak dinner -- seems to be the better attested,* but what the heck. How many martinis, and how do we know?
Read more »

Pesky grammar

Hey, kids! Who wants to be first to diagram this headless relative clause from the Washington Times?

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Islamic terrorists and a National Review columnist, asked in a recent column how a probe created to explore any Trump-Russia collusion became what amounts to a large federal task force throwing all of its considerable power against one man who worked only briefly for the candidate.

As is so often the case, the grammar that gets you in trouble isn't "bad" grammar; it's perfectly "correct" grammar that's correct about more than one thing.

Thumb lede

Pro tip: When you have a great idea for a lede, lie down and wait until the idea goes away. Then write your story and move on to the next thing. The test is whether you can place your thumb over the entire lede and still get everything you need out of the story. 

The Great Fraser Sinkhole is the sort of small-scale technological disaster that -- aside from being quite large-scale to the people affected by it -- should be a reminder to everyone of the value of competent, appropriately funded gummint at every level. So the answer to:

Who would have guessed officials would have cheered poop in a pipe?

... is "pretty much everyone who's been paying attention," though if you've been waiting all year to enjoy the satisfaction of saying "poop in a pipe," you should probably see if the TV stations are hiring. 

Should we have missed the news on Tuesday (as I did, being busy), it'd be nice to get it in a compact, professionalized format on Wednesday in more or less the usual time and place. I wonder if hubs are going to feel empowered to challenge (or better, simply delete) the occasional thumb lede.

Can't anybody here play this game?

No, he didn't -- say "I likes where our team's going," that is. According to the story, he was barely in the same ballpark:

"We need to keep forging ahead. Keep making improvements. But I like where our team is headed." 

Since football is one of the few things the paper covers as next-day news* anymore, could we at least have checked the spelling of his name against the lede?

Jim Harbaugh's not ready to get "emotionally hijacked" just yet. 

Then there's the 1D cutline:

Michigan's Donovan Peoples-Jones celebrates his 79-yard punt-return touchdown in the third quarter Saturday against Army at Michigan Stadium.

The one with a slightly different photo on 2D repeats the Forbidden Verb, but at least it gets the opponent right:

Michigan's Donovan Peoples-Jones (9) celebrates after returning a punt 79 yards for a touchdown against Air Force on Saturday.

In case you missed the news last weekend: More or less as soon as the current contract allows, the Freep told its staff that it was moving design and copy editing to the Gannett hub (or "regional design studio") in Louisville. The War on Editing appears to have reached the stage at which the losing side is allowed to keep its horses for spring planting. The hub process might be inevitable. That doesn't mean we have to like it, but we can wish it looked more like a bad idea than an idea whose time has come.**

* It's at least a lesser sign of the apocalypse that the day's Tigers gamer was written by a stringer, not a staffer.
** Here's the Kid Rock paragraph online, if you're wondering how much attention the print edition gets: When the concert was announced, I didn't get upset about it. And I know why: Little Caesars Arena is a hockey arena. Many crowds over the years, I suspect, have been fans of performers like Kid Rock. I didn’t put his concert on my calendar.