Friday, September 16, 2005

Advice to the lovelorn

Your regular program of ranting about journalism will return when the workload clears a bit. Meanwhile, this from Thursday's online Guardian:

Nuclear fallout helps with dating corpses

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Reminds me of my favorite Missourian headline: Firefighters help burn survivors.

1:08 PM, September 20, 2005  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Witness: Gun went off during struggle with dead man"

11:30 PM, September 22, 2005  
Blogger fev said...

Y'all don't even want to _hear_ the one about the Girl Scouts.

11:50 PM, September 22, 2005  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

fred,

I vaugely recall a story about girl scouts...

of course we want to hear about it!

9:37 AM, September 25, 2005  
Blogger fev said...

Oh, all right.

There are three heds that everybody of my cohort at the CHN (and at least a couple of you are known to check in here every now and then) remembers. Ordered from memorable to most memorable, I'd say they are:

"School Board OKs Joint Use" (yeah, we were upstyle; it was the 1970s. Most of us had more hair too).

"Girl Scouts Have Openings"

And for the champion, you have to remember that OBC was a Kiwani, or whatever the singular of Kiwanis is, and that the Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast got a four-color 1A photo every year, no matter what.

So this particular year, the shooter-in-charge (I'm guessing Alex, but you other veterans are welcome to chime in) decided to do an action photo: Six Kiwanis standing in a line and waving spatulas. Great.

Process color was exceptional enough in those days that it was set up fairly well in advance, and on the page flat the color spot was represented by a "knockout": something opaque, like black construction paper, that would knock out an appropriate space on the black plate. So there was a nice four-column knockout on the page when word came to our little PM world that the Salvadoran government had gotten its thumb out and arrested six from the lower ranks in the kidnap/rape/murder of four Maryknolls (three nuns and a lay worker, if I recall aright).

Hence the all-time favorite CHN hed:
"SIX HELD IN MURDER OF U.S. NUNS"

I trust that clears things up.

9:22 PM, October 21, 2005  

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