Revenge of the deep-fried cheese curds

Q: If the lede has Berkley, "eight-year tussle," parking and "popular restaurant," can the eatery's deep-fried cheese curds be far behind?

A: No, they cannot.

Yes, the well-seasoned solution that finally seemed ready for plating two weeks ago has been, well, plated. Or at least not tabled. As chronicled earlier, the cheese curds have also appeared in 2014 and 2016, though displaced by the eatery's mac and cheese in the January 2020 take. (And where's my Brew Detroit ale, while you're at it?)

This version is from the website, since Thursday meetings no longer appear in Friday newspapers. One wonders if it will adorn the dead trees on Saturday. On the other hand, one really doesn't.

Toasted yellow tumult

OK, not technically an Elongated Yellow Fruit (because insufficient adjectives), but these few grafs manage to go off the rails in alarming numbers of ways. One, I don't think you can pull "toasted" all the way around to modify "tumult." (And 1A, even if you can, it's not an excuse for the alliteration.) Two, culinary hegemony over what? Three, enough already with the schmears, for the same underlying reason as four, "some defenders"? If you're going to drop a pun, don't rub it in (3), and (4) stand up for the poor thing; don't fabricate some people who cried a cry we doubt ever got cried.*

Even the Times lets the writering get out of hand sometimes. Go forth and don't likewise.

* H/t some old New Yorker column filler or another. they were great

Today in writering

Some issues just can't make it into the dominant local fishwrap without being subjected to some excess writering. Such is the long-running gripe about parking chronicled above.*

If you've been around a bit, you might recall how things looked in May 2014:

Guirey and his neighbors say they believe that the lot will drop their property values faster than Vinsetta Garage diners order french fries and cheese curds with their beer and custard milkshakes.

The cheese curds were back in October 2016:

Restaurateur Curt Catallo — owner of celebrated eateries in Clarkston, Fenton and the auto-themed Vinsetta Garage on Woodward in Berkley — has been a winner at earning thumbs-up from restaurant critics as well as customers hungry for his beer-battered, deep-fried cheese curds.

Thus, you might not have been surprised that the matter earned both a "Christmas came late" and (surprise) another "eatery" when it cropped up again at the beginning of this week:

Would it be too much to ask to just get the news, hold the cheese curds?

* I'm tempted to score "an order of the eatery's mac and cheese with a Brew Detroit ale" as a biscuit conditional, too. Does the mac and cheese stay in place without the ale?

If it sounds like writing ...

"Iconic Detroit novelist" is a properly formed Elongated Yellow Fruit, sure, but "iconic" needs an analytic category all its own. Especially when you have two of them in the first five lines of a blurb about a movie, and double-especially when it's about the writer who would have advised you to "leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."

The "iconic" plague is persistent in these parts. We seem to have trouble writing about Buddy's Pizza without it. Here's Dec. 5:

 And Dec. 7:

If we could summon him with an eight-square Buddy's and a six-pack of Stroh's, Elmore Leonard might remind us that if an institution is genuinely iconic, you're wasting time to remind people. But he might just file that under the broader admonition that if stuff sounds like writing, you should rewrite it.

No, but thanks for asking

Why is a Monday night game the centerpiece on Wednesday's 1A? Probably because journalism will never give up its insistence on breaking the Fourth Wall and speaking directly on behalf of the whole beleaguered city/state/nation/whatever:

It felt like the whole state was sighing Tuesday, didn’t it? When we weren’t pounding on tables or screaming at replays?

It’s not like we’ve never experienced a loss before. Are you kidding? Lions fans experience loss? Are a wine maker’s fingers purple?

Can't say I saw a lot of the Whole State on Tuesday, but the parts I did see appeared to be holding up pretty well amid the burden.  

And while we're at it: No "cracked." If it ain't funny enough to stand without the prompt, it ain't funny enough, period.

Radar love

If you were peacefully leafing through your Thursday Freep ad following the jumps of those hard-hitting 1A stories, you might have been a bit taken aback by the radar:

In a case of trickery and thievery pending in Detroit federal court, Gills is among a growing number of targets who have come under the government's radar in recent years for what prosecutors describe as a pervasive and costly crime: the theft of dead people's benefits.  

Now, you might have thought that "under the radar" meant more or less what the OED says: "In phrases in which the detection of something, or the relative amount of attention given to it, is indicated by whether it registers on a figurative radar," not some strange variant of "under the scrutiny of." Indeed, the figurative radar is pretty common on the sports pages:

The 6-foot-6, 248-pounder has been flying under the radar of many recruiting services, despite holding scholarship offers from Illinois, Bowling Green, Kent State, Miami (Ohio) and Toledo. (6/19/2015)

A guy who was living under the radar of Detroit Lions media and most fans. (9/8/2016)

A sleeper quarterback to keep an eye out for is Frankie Potenza of Rochester Stoney Creek. Potenza is flying under the radar of most recruiting services, but that could change after this weekend. (6/16/2017)

But despite a few traditional hits, the news pages seem to be a different story:

According to Lane's affidavit, Bates came under the radar of the Office of Inspector General in 2013, after an audit revealed more than $478,000 in potential losses from the VA Canteen. (5/6/2015)

According to officials, the infamous duo's crime spree took them through Missouri, Georgia, Alabama and Florida before they first came under the radar of the Escambia County Sheriff's Office after an armed robbery at Famous Footwear on Davis Highway. (12/29/2016; apparently a year-end pickup from a Gannett cousin)

Smith’s activities have also come under the radar of the federal government, specifically the FBI, which is also investigating the suburban prosecutor, according to a source familiar with the case. (4/17/2019)
Sure, language changes and nothing is permanent and all that, but given that the OED's definition implies a straightforward distinction -- something "under the radar" is something that isn't "on the radar," and writers might take that as a hint -- you'd like to think some old editor would push to preserve the Old Ways.

Somewhere there's heaven

All together now: When our crater-ridden neighbor hits your eye like an iconic four-square Detroit-style pie, that's some writering. (That's some writering.)

I'm still trying to figure out how the horizon got to be above the Space Center, but that's probably a good place to stop.

No, you can't use the average

When we tell you young sprouts that you should never write puns as headlines, it isn't because we want to crush your souls. OK, it isn't just because we want to crush your souls; the larger reason is that you should never write puns in headlines unless you are very, very good at it,* and on the off chance you are, whatever story you're hedding probably doesn't lend itself to the pun treatment anyway. 

Should you think all the soul-crushing is worth the candle, though, several things must ye do. One, make sure the pun works literally as well as figuratively. The headline is still supposed to deliver the mail, after all, and if cleverness gets in the way of telling your audience what went on, best to omit the cleverness.** Two, it's a headline, so any of the facts it sets forth need to be clear -- not just implied -- in the text. So if you've bet your immortal soul on "Fast four-ward" in the hammer and reminded us in the deck to expect "a quartet of reasons to care," you probably shouldn't start by offering three reasons to care:

• The Tigers play baseball
• Baseball is fun
• In January, you'll wish you could watch the Tigers and the Royals!

That's as may be. I suppose the job of the columnist is to stir up all the people who will have their hands full with basketball and hockey by then, but it's still only one reason, for a total of three.

OK, it's sports, and nobody said there would be math. But proceed to the jump:

No, that's five reasons. (You can tell, because it says "Here are five reasons.") You can't take the average of three on the front and five on the jump and call it a four-peat "fast four-ward." That's not how measures of central tendency work.

Are there more important things to worry about? There are certainly more important topics to worry about (and if you're expecting major regional papers to have the sort of alarm-bell effect about crises that they might have had two decades ago, you are in for a long wait). But that doesn't mean there's no relationship among the skills involved. Editors are the quiet kids at the end of the row who look at their own scorecards to check when the announcer makes some proclamation. With some care and feeding, they grow up into the quiet kids who check their own scorecards at news conferences when the secretary of state is describing the latest outrage from Iran. That still doesn't mean they get to do puns in headlines, but it might give a sense of purpose to the otherwise routine soul-crushing.

* Sort of like your NBA career. If you were that good, we probably would have noticed by now.
** But come hear the paper in Toronto next month that tells you why this maxim is slipping from our grasp as well.

Shut up, he unfolded

Did the nut graf in Friday morning's 1A tale about a lawsuit from Ferndale look familiar?

In a he-said, he-said tale unfolding in federal court, retired police detective William Wilson claims he was denied a promotion and forced into retirement as part of a bigger strategy to prevent an African-American from potentially being named police chief in Ferndale.

Maybe it's because you read the front page on March 6:

In a classic he-said, she-said tale unfolding in federal court, ex-Uber driver David Shaw, 38, is suing the City of Ferndale, alleging three police officers wrongfully arrested him the night he picked up six drunk patrons from Rosie O'Grady's. And he's suing the passengers, too —  five of them women — for emotional distress, alleging he was racially taunted and physically assaulted after ordering them out of his car for their behavior.

In the Good Old Days (pre-War on Editing), we could worry about whether whether anyone was still listening to the rule about the Oxford comma, and lessons would be drawn about attention to detail. Mere attention to detail seems quaint now. If the robots are actually going to take over the reporting world, could we ask them politely to search the old memory banks for cliches used within the past three months and EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE?

Please make it stop

Once upon a time, children, some editor working in quiet anonymity on a feature about suburban libraries would have spotted a random relative clause as it wandered into traffic and stopped it. Terminated its command with extreme prejudice, maybe, if it was movie night at the library, but by all means kept it from afflicting readers whose only offense was to start reading in the first place.

Truth be told, of course, we used to lose those battles as often as we'd win them. Someone up the food chain might like the flow of it, or want to lighten up and have a little fun, or complain that boring editors are driving away the readers who will sustain us in the future.  To which -- fine, but if you have to drag your innocent restaurant critic into your orgy of writering, could you at least spell his name the same way he does?

Nibble on they tiny feet

Is it just me, or is an especially morbid tableau awaiting the guests at Mitch Albom's table this holiday season?

Truth in advertising

What could possibly go wrong when you turn a brite from the hinterlands over to the general assignment desk for some writering? Take it away, The Washington Post:

On late Saturday morning, a bird flew out of the cold Detroit sky, across an airfield and into the cockpit of a jetliner bound south for Atlanta.

Some believe it was a sparrow. Some, a hummingbird. A Delta Air Lines spokesman referred to it only as a “stowaway” — and, in any case, it would be a long delay before anyone on Flight 1943 could catch the thing to get a look at it.

The cold Romulus sky, maybe. The terminal Delta uses is a bit over 20 miles* from Charles Lindbergh's birthplace in midtown Detroit. Whether the bird flew "across an airfield and into the cockpit of a jetliner" is a matter of speculation, to put it politely. The days of the open cockpit are largely behind us, but wherever in Wayne County you were, it was at least pretty cold.

Which gets to the dueling belief systems, sparrow vs. hummingbird. If you were writing cutlines in the good old days of journalism and you didn't know whether the scary thing in the picture was a rifle or a shotgun, you would find someone in the building who knew the difference and ask. Everyone's short-staffed at holidays, but maybe the nice folks at the Cornell Lab could help improve the odds a bit. Having a birder in the next room, I took the old-fashioned route: Hey, those birds in the terminals at Metro -- what are they? (Answer: "Mostly sparrows.") The closest the story itself gets is that someone thinks the pilot might have said "hummingbird."

So, since "we were just outside Barstow, on the edge of the desert" is taken, maybe we could try "A stately, plump sparrow found its way to gate A4 at Detroit Metro Airport and down the jetway sometime Saturday morning." Or, if we insist on not making stuff up,** stick with the AP's "It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a bird on a plane." And, basically: Forget flood. Interview hummingbird in suburban Detroit at the end of December.

I'm kind of stuck on the not-making-stuff-up part, because this does seem rather a lot of time and effort to put into a story that's already been covered elsewhere. The hed promises a "how" story, but the only "how" part seems to be the fictionalized lede. Shouldn't we be off writing about hunger, world peace or the price of checked baggage instead?

OK, that's not entirely fair. Come to that, I ought to be writing about Fox's coverage of Iran, rather than complaining about long-range featurization.*** But this story is No. 4 on the "Post Most" morning newsletter, the top story being "Niagara Falls is coated in ice — and absolutely jaw-dropping."**** So I'm a little concerned about handing your news judgment over to the "most popular right now" algorithm, but I really don't want to think about what's going to happen if Iran is given to rewrite with instructions to pep it up a little.

* Dulles is 27.5 miles from the Washington Post (per Google Maps), if you're scoring along at home.
** Meaning "I've had it up to here" probably wouldn't qualify, so don't.
*** I think the preposition is out of place, too. The modifier can replace the (optional) preposition, so "on Thursday" becomes "early Thursday," but if you keep the preposition, it's "late on Saturday morning," not "on late Saturday morning."
**** Which, given that you have a picture of Niagara Falls coated in ice, is why trainees are told to show, not tell.

Keep calm and babble on

Pro tip: If you have to tell your audience (or the press) that you're paraphrasing Churchill, yur doin it wrong.

Thumb lede

Pro tip: When you have a great idea for a lede, lie down and wait until the idea goes away. Then write your story and move on to the next thing. The test is whether you can place your thumb over the entire lede and still get everything you need out of the story. 

The Great Fraser Sinkhole is the sort of small-scale technological disaster that -- aside from being quite large-scale to the people affected by it -- should be a reminder to everyone of the value of competent, appropriately funded gummint at every level. So the answer to:

Who would have guessed officials would have cheered poop in a pipe?

... is "pretty much everyone who's been paying attention," though if you've been waiting all year to enjoy the satisfaction of saying "poop in a pipe," you should probably see if the TV stations are hiring. 

Should we have missed the news on Tuesday (as I did, being busy), it'd be nice to get it in a compact, professionalized format on Wednesday in more or less the usual time and place. I wonder if hubs are going to feel empowered to challenge (or better, simply delete) the occasional thumb lede.