Weekend Wrap Up

The Cal

The School News CP was terrible editing. The first graf doesn’t even make sense and it’s on the school news section. Shouldn’t the grammar be right? Wait, my grammar is terrible too. But I’m not a newspaper with copy editors.
LAKE ELSINORE ---- Annette Tarnowski's path to becoming the Lake Elsinore High School band director was fueled by her passion for music and the desire to help inspire that same passion in young people.

Despite what my comments may say, I do appreciate the work of Ms. Rani Gupta. I do think, she needs a firmer editing hand to tighten up her stories. Here is her lede on busing issues:
Last year, Forrest Allen had an uneventful 25-minute bus ride to school. Now, the seventh-grader navigates narrow roads and dodges reckless drivers on his daily bike ride to Menifee Valley Middle School.

"Half the time, people try to hit us," said Forrest, 13, who bikes to school with his friend, Ryan Vasquez.

Part of his route to school has only a narrow paved shoulder, with no sidewalk to separate the boys from motorists.Forrest said teenage drivers will step on the gas, pelting him with rocks, or cross lanes to try to scare him.

"People speed up and they go in the wrong lane and go at us," he said. "They just try to make us go off the road."

Here is the actual reason for the story – six grafs down: Forrest and Ryan are two of hundreds of Southwest County students who lost transportation this year as some school districts eliminated some bus service by increasing the distance around schools within which students must walk or find their own transportation.

I don’t mind anecdotal ledes. In fact, they work well if done right, which means they better be tight and to the point. This story isn’t about people trying to run Forrest down. If it was that lede might work. No this story is about bus service being eliminated.
Ms. Gupta has led us down a dusty trail to a different story then flipped it on us at the last second.

Ms. Gupta redeemed herself with this story about the school district talking about selling bonds to pay for retiree benefits. It’s not earth shattering writing but it’s the perfect writing for this story that brings important information to readers.

Can someone tell me why this belongs on A-1?

Lastly, it’s not all bad. Mr. Dave Downey did a great story on the terrible week that was for SDG&E. As a one-time customer they deserve every come-uppance that heads their way.

The UT
Thanks Mr. Mike Lee for this interesting story on bisons at Camp Pendleton. Who would have thunk it? Certainly not me. Something about bombs, training, gun fire and furry wooly beasts made Sunday breakfast a little easier.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080907/news_1n7bison.html

The PE
Good story about how cargo affects the Inland area by a slew of reporters. Did it deserve to be such a big project with so much type dedicated to it? Nope. Too long and the graphics of what is in my house isn’t needed.
Also a tip for the PE –- we don’t care about Riverside in Temecula Valley. We have a ton of truck traffic coming up from San Diego and Mexico. Shouldn’t our version focus on that? Tell your transportation reporters to take a glimpse south because I think we have a lot of advertising dollars in our area and most of us are San Diego-lites not Riverside lovers. We don’t spend our weekends in Riverside. We don’t drive up there for festivals. We go to San Diego.

Mr Begley was a busy man. He also wrote about vacationers staying closer to home for the summer. Um, Mr. Begley and editors who pitched this tripe: the summer is almost over and quit writing non-trend stories.
What’s next a trend story on the rise in popularity of people driving green colored cars on Mondays?

Reporter Michelle Klampe had another trend story about teachers using high-tech devices. Not only has that story been done by every media outlet in America, the PE did that same story less than a year ago. How hard is it for reporters to check the paper library to see if the story has been done?

Mr. Sean Nealon did a tubers story. It was much better than the tuber Olympics in the Cal a week ago, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. How is that for some bad writing? Why do I need two large grafs of color when the third graf is the lede:
A truck loaded with 50,000 pounds of Chieftain potatoes coated in dirt from an Anza field arrives at the San Jacinto packing shed. Immediately, the red potatoes get a bath and, dripping, ride a conveyer belt inside.
Several dozen workers pick out dried grass and discard misshapen and rotten potatoes. Machines sort the potatoes by size and drop them into 50-pound boxes.
A year ago, Agri-Empire, a 63-year-old company in San Jacinto that farms 4,000 acres of potatoes in Southern California, sold those boxes for $20. Today, it is getting twice that.
That’s called being too cutesy and an editor should have caught that.

When I opened the local section I thought Mr. Aaron Burgin had done the story of weekend. The photo by Kurt Miller was classic with a lady straddling a small flood ditch and looming apartments in the background.
Then I started reading the story:
Lake Elsinore's failure to completely address runoff issues plaguing neighbors on a street in an unincorporated pocket could spoil its plans to annex the land.
I would have went with color or a story from one of the people in the neighborhood about the run off. This lede fails the photo and fails the story. It’s boring and it could be used for anything. It’s a template lede.
“Hollywood’s failure to completely address spiderman shooting webs on a street in town could spoil its plans to create Spider Land.”

Kudos to Jeff Horseman for doing a short overview on hospital construction in the area. I think the story needed people who would be affected because that would have brought the story home. At least it was a good idea.