This is the opening sentence from a front page article in this week's West Hartford News.
Seriously.
Another article, on page 4, begins with the following: "In an era where economic certainty grows and grows, it is a timely exhibition hosted at Saint Joseph College at the Bruyette Athenaeum."
What? What are you talking about? Was there some other sentence that appeared before this that somehow didn't make it to print? And, regardless, should you be telling us that we're in an era where economic certainty grows and grows? Doesn't that contradict the semi-sentence that opened the other article, where there was "naturally, concerns about the economy"?
The fact that West Hartford continues to have a weekly paper is a wonderful and rare thing. It should be embraced by the community. However, sloppy exercises like these make such support difficult.
It certainly seems as if the staff at the News is quite small (for example, all of the major articles in this week's issue are credited to the same writer). But where's the editor? If you have one person pumping out five articles for each edition, you need someone to be there to make sure it all makes sense. I'm not claiming any great skill, and have written plenty of clumsy sentences right here on this blog, but if the News is spread so thin that a basic grammar check can't happen, then perhaps it's time for the paper to completely be taken over by press releases.
C'mon, West Hartford News. You survived the Journal Register's chopping block back in January, prove to us that you deserve to be around.
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5 comments:
That reporter can't write.
And how about this one:
"Implimentation plan unveiled"
Wonderful.
I think it's a combo of an overworked reporter and an bad editor. I've seen what happens when an editor messes with an article. Sometimes the end result is nothing close to the original submission. That being said, I'm sure some of these errors come directly from the author.
Honestly, though, it seems as if the Microsoft Word grammar check could solve half of these problems.
It's just sad.
Ha! I just wrote "an bad editor." I need a good editor myself!
You take the generous view, nice guy! If a good editor rewrote these articles entirely, that would be a good thing.
The real problem, of course, is that we have no newspaper in West Hartford worthy of the name.
What do you want? They were, until recently, a Journal Register property, don't forget. That old MultiMate word processing software that they are still using just doesn't have spell-check functionality.....
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