In the head-over-heels rush to get on-line, Web site editors sometimes push the “publish” button before they’ve checked to see if their own edit makes any sense.
This week’s prize for the most baffling web posting goes to the on-line editors of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who managed to thoroughly mangle a straightforward Associated Press report today — about an event in their own backyard.
For more than an hour this afternoon, the newspaper was out there with a story bereft of a few essential elements — like a certain fact that a quote referred back to, and a key verb which opened up a variety of tantalizing fill-in-the-blank options for imaginative readers. The bizarre posting was eventually replaced by a web story filed by a Post-Gazette reporter that made sense — which, of course, raises the question of why you wouldn’t wait a few minutes for your own guy to file, instead of tossing up a butchered version of an AP story so maimed that it was rendered senseless?
Post-Gazette editors cut a 23-paragraph Mike Glover AP story about a John Kerry rally at the University of Pittsburgh down to a tight 5 grafs, and, despite leaving themselves very little to work with, still managed to make two glaring errors. The first doesn’t really need to be explained — we’ll just reprint it:
Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris Kerry today. [sic — of course]
What, exactly, did Harris do with, or to, Kerry? The mind reels through the possibilities. Debate him? Flatten him with an off-tackle rush? Punch him out? Back to Glover’s original story hurried Campaign Desk, where we learned that “famed Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris and Bon Jovi joined Kerry on Friday.”)
The P-G‘s second omission involves a mystifying quote from 21-year-old Pitt News editor-in-chief Greg Heller-LaBelle, who says, “The thing about this generation is, we’re not stupid, we’re just lazy. If you could vote online, I think you’d see that number skyrocket.”
What number might that be? Why, the number of young people who vote. (That’s the part editors sliced out, leaving the seemingly cryptic Heller-LaBelle referring back to … nothing. )
In the spirit of the Post-Gazette, we won’t use any verbs, gerunds or adjectives to describe what we think of all this. We’re sure you can come up with some of your own.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.