Some readers of the Greensheet, The Virginian-Pilot’s TV listings published each Saturday, have complained that some of their favorites have been missing. These include daily Best Bets, the Sports Digest and the occasional puzzles.
Their calls and e-mails restored the Sports Digest on Jan. 26, but the rest is gone, a victim of cost-cutting.
Deputy managing editor Tonnya Kennedy explains:
“Newsprint is The Pilot’s largest expense. In the current economy, that’s one of the places we’re looking for expense reductions. So we decided to cut four weekday pages of Best Bets. We left the weekend Best Bets, since weekends are higher in TV viewership.”
Kennedy said the cuts actually get the paper closer to the original plan for the Greensheet — about three-quarters of a page of Best Bets.
The weekly Sports Digest was also cut, the thinking being that the Sports section’s daily listing of televised sports would satisfy readers.
But Greensheet readers let us know that they want the tabloid listing, too.
Bob Michel registered his “upsetness,” while another reader, Paul Chasey, lamented the loss of “a very valuable commodity for sports enthusiasts.”
Said Earl Watson: “It’s almost like a biblical thing when I’m looking to index everything and it’s not there anymore.”
So the Sports Digest returned.
Only a couple of readers complained about the missing puzzles or the daily Best Bets.
NO.: Sara Taylor wanted to know why we put a period after “No” in a front-page banner headline Tuesday. “It just seems strange that you would have a headline that is just not right,” she said.
The headline: “No. U.S. peacekeepers, Bush says.”
It prompted Taylor and a couple of readers to ask how we could make such a mistake and not catch it. Doesn’t anybody read the pages (we call them proofs) before they go to press? they asked.
Of course we do. So how did it get by?
Because it was proofed, then rewritten, I’m told. Proofed on the page, rewritten on the computer screen. It was even spell-checked.
“But the period just didn’t jump out at me,” said the headline writer.
All of which reminds me of what one reader told me during my first weeks in this job: Journalists are unique in that they broadcast their errors in big type.
FUZZY MATH: I hope this doesn’t spoil things for Petty Officers 2nd Class Trent and Ingrad Osier of Portsmouth, but the military raises they got recently don’t equal as big of a percentage of their family income as Trent Osier thinks.
The couple, each with nine years of service apiece, each saw a 6.5 percent increase in gross pay. Staff writer Melissa Wood said in an article on the cover of Tuesday’s Business section that the raises equal 13 percent of the family’s income. Because that’s what Trent Osier told her, Wood said.
Wood, who confesses math has never been her strong suit, didn’t do the math. But a couple of readers did, and they said the correct percentage pay increase is 6.5 percent — not 13 percent.
If there’s a moral to this, it’s this: Reporters and editors should double-check computations in their stories.
LOOKS LIKE …: Cameron Foster, the creative director for Rowena’s in Norfolk, knows the difference between a coconut poundcake and a sweet potato poundcake. The photo on the cover of the Jan. 23 Flavor section illustrating a recipe inside for sweet potato poundcake was not only a photo of a coconut poundcake, but it was from an old Rowena’s catalog.
“That’s ours,” she said.
So why was it used with a story about a new book, The Church Ladies’ Divine Desserts?
It was used — and labeled — as “file photo.” In newspaper terms, that means the photograph was pulled from our files to illustrate a story. It’s a tricky business. Sometimes we pull file photos that create confusion or are misleading. Like the one a couple of years back that included a woman volunteering at a community event. She was since deceased. Or the one recently of a more than 2-year-old exhibit at a local children’s museum.
In the case of the cake, the Flavor editor pulled an unlabeled slide of the Rowena’s coconut poundcake (“best coconut cake you’ll ever put in your mouth”) to illustrate the sweet potato poundcake recipe.
The file photo beside it is a staff-produced photo of bread pudding. Apricot bread pudding, to be exact. It illustrates “Z’s Bread Pudding” recipe in the book. Minus the apricots.
