Monday, April 14, 2008

Another Reason Why Newspapers Are Dying

Just another quickie today. The Education Confrontation series is still an ongoing concern - the first draft of part 2 is well underway - but it got quite sidetracked in dealing with the troll.


(Oh, and note to RebelAngel, who I like: Yep, I'm a dude. No bluffing about it. I'm a bad enough looking guy, but I would make one horribly ugly woman. Everyone around me should be grateful, for aesthetic reasons if nothing else, that the coin came up the way it did when my gender was determined.)


Today I'm going to quickly note another reason why newspapers are dying. This may become yet another ongoing theme for this blog. Every time I read a paper lately (I generally read at least one each day, and often more) I wind up feeling like I'm looking at one of my son's "What's Wrong With This Picture" puzzles.

This was an honest-to-goodness front page, above-the-fold headline in a recent New Brunswick newspaper (also available online, with the error gleefully intact):

Record 373 centimetres of snow fell on Miramichi

Then, from the article. This part was still on the front page. Emphasis added:

....a record 373 centimetres (147 inches, or 12.25 feet) of snowfall between Jan. 1-March 31 — the largest snowfall since 1967, when 483 centimetres fell.

Someone got paid to write this, and someone else got paid to edit it. Note to all involved: The word "record" does not mean what you think it means.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my kitchen as seen from my computer room (the exact view I would see by turning my head 90 degrees to the right as I type this). Those things all over the side of the stove are magnetic jigsaw puzzle pieces.

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