Most days, the front page of the Journal carries some headlines and photos above or beside the masthead. They’re called skyboxes, or ears, and they are a way to promote stories inside the paper or those that are coming in the next day or two. Fridays, we usually turn one of those spaces over to promote a Sunday story. Last Friday, it was for a story on how the city moves forward in a positive manner after the Darryl Hunt apology and settlement.
That story didn’t run on Sunday. Here’s why. A police officer was killed Friday morning, and we felt that the juxtaposition between our coverage of the continuing investigation into the death of Sgt. Howard Plouff at the Red Rooster and coverage of the Hunt/Sykes case, with its implicit and explicit discussion of how police made mistakes in that investigation would be wrong.
We could argue in good faith that the articles were independent of each other, but perception is important, and the stories would have looked wrong on the same page and in the same issue.
Ashtrays come standard: Our Sunday story on the move of Imperial Tobacco into the U.S. market contained this interesting fact. Three of Commonwealth Tobacco’s top brands are also car names: Malibu, Riviera and Sonoma. Now, know nobody drives a Lucky Strike or a Marlboro, but I wonder if there are other overlaps between these two sectors of the economy (no Camel jokes please). If you think of one, send it my way.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
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