I’ve talked in the past about how the different ways newspapers play big stories, such as the report from the Iraq Study Group. At the opposite end of the spectrum is our little bright today about a new study on procrastination. This was a wonderful little reader from the Associated Press that many newspapers spotted as being a fun piece. you can go on the Newseum web site and look at front pages. There’s a lot that have this piece at the bottom of A1 somewhere.
This is one of those stories that just about writes its own headline. There are lots of iterations of: “Read this story now—or later” etc. etc. etc.
Newspaper editors are drawn to puns like moths to a flame. Our wire editor, John Seccombe, spotted this story early, and we thought it might make a nice change of pace on the front page, a little levity in a serious world of stem-cell votes, the war in Iraq etc. Humor is a commodity that often seems to be purposely stripped from newspapers.
We kicked around some ideas at our budget meeting. Les Gura, our metro editor, had the idea of doing a clip-and-save dotted line with the story, making the joke a bit more subtle. I thought it worked well.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
I kept looking for the discount on authentic replicas of World Trade Center memorial silver dollars that I was going to miss when I clipped the coupon, er article, and then put off using until four days after the expire date on the coupon, er article.
Keep looking. They’re there…
The “clip and save” border idea was brilliant!
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