Author Topic: My favorite paper is not having a good day  (Read 806428 times)

Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #75 on: November 09, 2017, 11:30:01 AM »
1. Once or twice a week, The Record print edition puts the Main and Sports sections inside a 1.5-page overlay ad, where the top of the half front pages are copies of the real pages and line up perfectly with the actual front pages. Didn't quite line up today.


2. "phrase" - not "phase"


3. "too" - not "to" (how did they manage to get it right just 3 words later?)


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #76 on: November 10, 2017, 07:22:44 PM »
1. Major screw-up here when the paper has no idea what country the president was in last Tuesday.


2. Lesser screw-ups here. The first one should be "Derek" and the second one is extremely obbbvious.


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #77 on: November 11, 2017, 01:00:00 PM »
1&2. The error is in the second one, but because that enlargement cuts out most of the headline, I've included the full headline first.

It's another article about how Puerto Rico is still struggling because of Hurricane Maria. The problem is that the sub-headline says that the storm happened 7 months ago, while the first line of the second paragraph states - correctly - that it occurred 7 weeks ago. While I'm sure it must feel like 7 months ago to those affected, this mistake is just thoughtless.


3. If it's inspired by Gulen, then you have to use a hyphen: Gulen-inspired.


4. Speaking of hyphens, the underlined "word" is in dire need of one: male-centric.


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #78 on: November 14, 2017, 06:05:15 PM »
From yesterday:

1. The QB's first name is Jameis - not James.


Today:

2. The caption on an almost-identical photo of McAdoo (see my November 8 post) said he was "reacting". Today, it's the dreaded "looks on". Both captions are uninformative, empty-headed and created without the benefit of a single brain cell.


3. They're "discussing a play"? Seriously?


4. The last letter of the last word in the last sentence of the last paragraph? SOOOOOOO close!


4a. If The Record wrote song titles...............


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #79 on: November 15, 2017, 04:04:33 PM »
1. Wow! They actually remember that he was TALKING in this 18 year-old photo! And because he has a HEADSET on, he couldn't possibly be whistling, sucking on a lemon ball or grimacing as a Jets QB gets clotheslined. Remarkable!


2. Shouldn't there be a "to" after "close"?


3. "Everyday" is an adjective. It should read, "every day". An everyday activity is something you do every day.


4. This is the Jets' bye week............at least I thought it was. But according to the writer, it's their bye year because he says that the next game is on September 26 (OK - bye 10 months).
Absolutely sloppy!


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #80 on: November 15, 2017, 05:15:03 PM »
Because I'll be out of commission for a while, this might be a good time to wrap this up. If "my favorite paper" doesn't get the point by now - and they clearly don't - they never will. Of course, if I see something in the future that's SO remarkably stupid, I reserve the right to share it with people who have at least a minor command of the language and its rules. Feel free to post any glaring miscues yourself.

Since I've already posted today's stumbles, I'll leave you with something that - while technically not incorrect - is something that the paper has been doing since the takeover that's SO lazy, limiting, annoying (and frequent), that I've been collecting them for for the last 3 weeks or so, just to see how many there would be and how often they resort to this cheap excuse for a story.

The answer is 22 (plus one bit of sarcomicastic relief). Unfortunately, I can only include 20 images in a post, so 3 were omitted.

If you want to write for The Record and your favorite number isn't 5, you're out, because everything can be explained, solved and used as filler through the magic of FIVE.

How else would you explain the over-dependence on this lazy tool?

Ready? (and why is there a period in the first one?............plus, they doubled-down on 5 in the last image on a topic that grips the heart and soul of every reader)




« Last Edit: November 15, 2017, 05:21:22 PM by BLeafe »
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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #81 on: February 01, 2018, 03:47:17 PM »
Over the past 2 months, The Record - especially the sports section - has gotten much better at spelling words correctly and cleaning up the myriad mistakes they CONSTANTLY made, though they are far from perfect (and they're still overdoing that annoying "5" thing I wrote about in the previous post).

After a few hiccups over the last couple of months, they're starting to slip again. Along with those hiccups, here are some of the other head-scratchers, ending with two stunning screwups this week:

(click where available to enlarge)



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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #82 on: February 02, 2018, 02:05:05 PM »
Art Stapleton has been a good football writer for The Record for a long time. After the ownership changed, he appears to have been required to use this idiotic "5 things" in almost every one of his stories and it's REALLY annoying. I know this probably isn't his idea because it's all over the paper..........it must be a USA Today thing.

Speaking of "things", here are 16 sequential ones from Mr. Stapleton in the last 6 weeks (12 in just the last 4 weeks). The last one is from today and it's somewhat misleading.

Click to enlarge most of them so you don't miss a "thing".





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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #83 on: February 04, 2018, 02:30:06 PM »
It's Super Spelling/Grammar Errors Sunday at The Record today.

Click to enlarge:



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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #84 on: February 10, 2018, 01:23:15 PM »
Still don't think that The Record is obsessed with the number 5?

13 of the 18 examples below are from this year, which is a mere 6 weeks old.

Click most of these to enlarge:




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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #85 on: March 14, 2018, 03:43:04 PM »
Another month of Five Jive from The Record (11 of 19 are just from the Sports writers):

(click to enlarge)


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day - TIMELY & USELESS
« Reply #86 on: March 17, 2018, 11:00:09 AM »
Binge-watching - the practice of watching multiple episodes of a television program in rapid succession, typically by means of DVDs or digital streaming.

This article doesn't recommend watching multiple episodes of a television program.......... it says to watch one episode of 5 different shows - hardly binge-watching and hardly worth taking up 80% of the front page of the entertainment (Better Living) section.

Click to enlarge so it can take up 80% of this post.



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Offline ericmartindale

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #87 on: March 17, 2018, 08:35:48 PM »
I have some pity for The Record, believe it or not. In order to have the level of copy-proofing that we saw as children and young adults, they would have to hire many more people, and that would not be economical.  And these days, it's barely economical to run a newspaper at all, and they are folding one by one as readers gravitate towards other news sources, especially online sources.  At least we have them as a news source, and at least they are no longer in Hackensack meddling with local matters.

Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #88 on: March 18, 2018, 01:30:47 PM »
Compared to what it once was, I pity The Record too, but I pity their readers much more. Have you read all the online vitriol against what they've done to this paper?

"Absolute garbage at this point. As bad as a handout. It appears Gannett, and the shameful people they’ve installed to run the operation, couldn’t care less about the embarrassing product."

"It’s a slap in the face to those of us who counted on The Record for so many years to bring us localized journalism."

"...riddled with typos. I mean, come on, an occasional error is one thing, but every day I see several and it is annoying. Isn’t the business of editors to, well, to EDIT?!?"

"An example of the Record’s crappy editing: I was reading about a football game last weekend. There was no final score in the headline or body of the article, just intermediate scores during a comeback scenario. Bush league."



Other complaints: local coverage is skimpy, more than half of the GOOD staff were let go and their content was replaced by articles from the Asbury Park Press, USA Today and other non-local sources, the print is much smaller, customer service has gone WAY downhill, they will not re-deliver if they missed you, the paper it's printed on has recently become very low-grade, and they're asking for large increases in the subscription rate for all these negatives.

There's actually not ONE thing I can think of that I could call an improvement since the takeover.

Can you?

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Offline BLeafe

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Re: My favorite paper is not having a good day
« Reply #89 on: March 19, 2018, 11:18:52 AM »
More sloppiness: in today's Record, whoever writes the photo captions doesn't know the difference between "photographs" and "photographers"...............TWICE in the same article.

Click to enlarge.


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anything