The good news is: Readers of The Salt Lake Tribune retain much of what they read in the newspaper.
The bad news is: The Salt Lake Tribune ran the same advice column by Carolyn Hax on Wednesday and Friday.
Some of you caught the repetition.
That led to an audit of the stories to find out how this could have happened — and an even worse discovery.
The Tribune ran the Hax column for Friday two days ahead of schedule and then ran it again on Friday. That means
many of you got her advice about looking for love 48 hours ahead of other advice aficionados in the country.
How this could happen is a bit more difficult to explain. In the vernacular, it’s called operator error — much like a
driver hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake and plowing into a storefront.
Many features, such as the advice columns, come to The Trib via electronic connections and then flow into computer
locations where editors can find them. Different editors are in charge of putting out sections every day, so the editors
assembling a page for Wednesday may not speak to the editors putting together a page for Friday. In this case, the editor
working on the Wednesday page apparently did not check the date the column was to run and simply placed it on the
page. The editor who did Friday’s page went to the features computer location and pulled off the advance Hax column
which apparently is moved to clients several times in a week.
At some point in the last few weeks, The Trib did not run the proper Hax column, meaning her feature has run several
days ahead of other papers for the last several weeks. Editors are not sure which day’s column did not run in The Trib.
Tribune Assistant Managing Editor Terry Orme says he will prod the editors involved to check the dates in the future.
And, you can find the older Hax columns at www.postwritersgroup.com/hax.htm where the syndicate posts her past
columns.
Teachers Equal? About 20 readers called and complained about the placement in Thursday’s Tribune of stories on the
two teachers who won the $25,000 Milken Education Awards. The story on Linda Morgan ran along with her photo on
the front page of that day’s paper. The story on the other winner of the same prize, Carrie Jean Jones of Castle Dale, ran
in the middle of the second page of the Utah section on the same day.
Readers wanted to know if the fact that Morgan taught in the Salt Lake Valley and Jones did not had anything to do
with the emphasis on one and not the other.
No, but lack of planning and hustle by the editor who handled the stories did. One story was written by staff writer
Shinika Sykes, the other by Tribune stringer John Serfustini. Either at the planning stage or the production stage,
according to Tribune Editor James E. Shelledy, the two stories should have been combined and both teachers should have
been featured on A-1.
Poor Sport? One angry reader (who did not leave his name or phone number) called on Friday to excoriate The Tribune
for running a story in Sunday’s Salt Substitute about the cost of gear for deer hunters.
“If you would sit your ass in your chair, I might be able to talk to you instead of your voice mail,” the reader said.
Ooooooh, maybe I should put my chair in the kitchen, where women should be, too.
“It’s none of your damn business what hunters spend for updated equipment,” the man said in reference to Skip
Knowles’ article that detailed what various kinds of equipment cost and featured an illustration (reminiscent of an
automobile ad) that said a base model hunter would be $400 and “Price as shown” for the decked-out woodsman was
$3,645.
“All that equipment puts meat on my table. It doesn’t matter what I use,” the caller said.
The article pointed out that the cost per pound of venison (if a hunter bagged one on the first trip) would be about $200
per pound.
Call it intuition, call me crazy, but I believe the little woman who belongs to that burly hunter found out what his hobby
costs when she read the article on Sunday.
And, for the record, The Tribune runs many articles on hobbies people pursue — including the cost of those hobbies.
One of my close friends maintains his fly-fishing vest is worth about $10,000 — if you open all the zippers and
pockets and inventory the flies. He is a catch and release man, so he can’t offer the excuse about putting protein on the
table.
