I took an editing class my junior year of college. I learned about headlines, different newspaper layouts, photojournalism and grammar, grammar, grammar. [Admittedly, rules of which I often break on this blog.] Occasionally we spent a class period looking at newspapers printed throughout the country. Our assignment would be to critic the front page of various publications. My professor advised my peers and I to look at small town newspapers because they usually had the worst layouts, photographs and headlines. The newspaper printed in the small town where I currently reside is no exception.
Truthfully, I refuse to read it 80 percent of the time. This is due to the fact that I can’t pick it up without 1. cringing and 2. wanting to take a red pen and edit the entire thing. Articles are placed in such a way that it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate between two separate news stories. Headline hierarchy is obviously a concept foreign to the editor. There is no font consistency. There is zero balance. And 98 percent of the stories have no significant news value. I wouldn’t consider the last fact to be a problem, considering it is a small town paper. But for the love of all that is journalism please be grammatically accurate.
Okay, now that I’ve vented on that just a bit, let’s cut to the chase as to why I’ve bothered to address this issue at all.
