Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Post-Gazette shows its colors

So, on Sunday, the Post-Gazette actually had an article about the Pittsburgh First rally, taking place today. It was a nice article, written by Mark Belko (here's a link) . The article talks about the rally being held by Pittsburgh First today outside the William Penn downtown. The article also discusses the efforts being made by Harrahs / Forrest City. However, when you read the article, take a look at the headline (I'll quote it verbatim as it appeared on the front page of the Sunday paper) - "Bidders pull out the stops on slots" with a smaller headline of "Rally to coincide with state hearing". Considering the most relevant (and the only new) piece of information in the article is the Pittsburgh First rally, don't you think it might have been worth mentioning that in the headline? What I'm saying specifically is that the headline could have mentioned Pittsburgh First, or IOC, since it is their rally. From what I understand, the people that write the articles don't write the headlines, so the decision is made by people that have a larger job of guiding the paper.

Of course, I could just be nitpicking again. That seems to be a hobby of mine... and I guess I've joined the misleading headline brigade with my own title to this article :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just ran across this article on TSN.com
http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/news_story/?ID=163073&hubname=nhl

...did anyone catch Bob and Mike plugging the rally during last nights game? They mentioned it 2 or 3 times actually.

Anonymous said...

Copy-editors write the headlines. Those are the folks who check each story for grammer/punctuation. It's a good guess that whomever wrote that headline is pretty clueless about the Pittsburgh First movement.