Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Where in the world ...?

Am I nuts?

Well, yes, but that's beside the point.

I started reading this story with the headline Creative top 10 list wins $1,000 for makeover in today's Daily News (online):

When physical education teacher Kyle Campbell enters his storage closet to get equipment, some wonder if he'll make his way back out. That's because the room is so jam-packed with items that often the only way to get in to the closet is to move everything out.

So when Campbell approached PTO president Hilary Odoy about working together to enter Gopher Sports 2008 Extreme Equipment Room Makeover, she was all for it.

I suddenly realized I had no idea where this equipment room "makeover" bid was taking place - Newbury? Newburyport? Salisbury? One of the other numerous towns the paper covers?

Nowhere in the whole story does it identify the town. Down in the 4th paragraph, it says it's at "Pine Grove." OK, that eliminated Newburyport and Amesbury - for me, who used to cover those two communities as a reporter.

Well, I had to look it up. There is a Pine Grove School in Rowley. I'm sure in the print edition it was in the Rowley section but online it's just in there with everything else.

Oh, sorry, down at the bottom of the series of snippets, it says that Michelle Pelletier Marshall is a correspondent who covers Rowley and Merrimac.

If I had read that first - I still would not have known where the school was.

My ex-editor at the Current used to harp on me because she said I had to include explanations for everything, as if every reader was from out of town - especially for the online edition. Score one for the editor of the Current.

2 comments:

Ari Herzog said...

My ex-editor at the Current used to harp on me because she said I had to include explanations for everything, as if every reader was from out of town - especially for the online edition. Score one for the editor of the Current.

I agree with her, to a point.

Gillian Swart said...

I agreed with her, to a point. Problem is, she went way over that point. But I guess in the end, more is always better than less.