Tuesday, March 10, 2020

If you can't win a Pulitzer, at least try not to win a Darwin

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If marijuana -- hell, crystal meth -- isn't legal in Nebraska (it's not), you'd be hard-pressed to divine that from the Omaha World-Herald's website tonight.

This fails every possible journalistic test. It fails in newsworthiness. It fails in "what folks are worried about." It even fails the Internet Age test of "What story is gonna get the most page views?"

PUTTING "Creighton looks to spruce up 24th Street" in the lead-story slot over, oh, coronavirus fast getting a foothold in the Omaha area even fails a basic tenet of the news business that every first-year journalism student learns in college -- if not on their high-school newspaper: The most important story gets the most important slot.

I can't say I know exactly what the hell is going on here, but whatever it is, it's seriously messed up.

The World-Herald hasn't won a Pulitzer Prize since 1944 (and probably won't under the bleed-it-dry ownership of Lee Enterprises) but at least you'd think it wouldn't be too much to ask that it not try for the newspaper version of the Darwin Awards.

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