April 15, 2010

On recess and still making me laugh

Some people can't resist making a story better. Count my fellow blogger and encourager Jim of L-Town among them. He's off chasing fun in his barely used RV and shared this in a recent post:

Front page headline in the Canton Repository: "No jail for man who urinated on Walmart steaks." He does have to pay $688 for the steaks and do 100 hours of community service. Here's the link.`

See, even when he's free from "Free from Editors" he's still has an eye for the interesting.

By the way, while fumbling around on the Internet I found some of James L. Smith' Offbeat posts. Ignore my name, it is a quirk identifying who posted the item online rather then wrote it. Enjoy the source that used to provide a weekly laugh.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the mention. We're home and I'll be back to blogging at FFE soon.

    On a side note, I've gotten a few e-mails from former staffers complaining about the quirk that deletes their byline and replaces it with whoever posted it online.

    One guy with an flair for history stories (you'll know who this is) thinks this is atrocious because when researchers look for FJ stories they will have no idea who the real source is.

    Wouldn't this be easy to fix?

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  2. A simple fix is that anyone can add a comment telling who the real reporter/writer is.

    Right now, the "byline" actually is the person who posted the story online. I think Advance could safely assume that most mlive.com stories, at least The Flint Journal ones, published before Jan. 1, 2009 were not written by the person doing the posting. So they could add Posted in front of the by.

    There are exceptions, but that's a very limited list - Andrew Heller, Bill Khan and Tony Dearing. Maybe a few others. But most of you preferred to avoid posting your own :)

    I think it is frustrating for many people across all of the Advance Internet sites

    ReplyDelete