Liniment Formulae

Broken breaking news: Zoning meeting relocated! Mid-level bureaucrat tasked with middling new responsibilities! Land-use plan available for comment!

I meant to post this four weeks ago based on a Twitter update from Nick Bergus, but I’m only getting around to it today after spotting some particularly silly examples: How embarrassingly mislabeled are so many newspapers’ “breaking news” sections and items?

Most news doesn’t truly “break,” after all, despite the re-branding of some local news and metro departments as “breaking news teams.” So mixed in with headlines of a more credibly breaking nature (“Meteorite impact levels orphanage, causes bus plunge, closes 48 lanes of I-95″) are some of a more, well, pedestrian nature. As always, not to pick on anyone in particular, but to illustrate the breed with a few specimens:

• Draft of Troutdale’s land use plan available for comment
• Sheriff puts training director in charge of jails
• Palm Beach County moves zoning meetings
• Local SPCA needs help with Hurricane Ike animal rescue
• Dolphins have only one turnover, and want to keep it that way

News? Perhaps. Interesting news? Maybe. But breaking news? More like, as Mark Hamilton offered, “the scheduled event is about to begin,” or “stories we happened to have just finished and posted.” Or in all too many cases, if we’re being really, really honest, “stories on which you’ll instantly regret clicking that we almost certainly should not have even bothered writing.”

This just in: Area man still frustrated while trying to find basic contact information on newspaper website

I look up the physical addresses of a lot of newspapers while putting together Paper View Monday updates. Actually, make that try to look up a lot of newspaper building addresses, because the process is immensely annoying and frequently futile. Often, I simply give up and make cat videos instead. As I put it the last time I whinged this particular whinge, “Nearly every newspaper site I visit seems to protect the physical location of its office with the sort of paranoid zeal more commonly associated with Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location.”

In case you were anxiously waiting for a six-month update, it’s still hugely aggravating. And today I had the added pleasure of trying to find individual staff contact info at a particular newspaper that is generally praised for its otherwise admirable online efforts. Best I could find: An explanation of the e-mail address format used by the paper (firstname.lastname@annoyingnewspaperwebsite.com), but no staff list to which I could then apply that convention.

(I also learned, while wandering sections of the site that appear not to have been updated since 1997, that while they accept press releases via e-mail, one should always follow up with a phone call to confrim that the press release was received. Because that’s not annoying or superfluous.)

All I ask for: Street address somewhere obvious, perhaps even in the footer of the index page itself, and a “contact us” section that actually indiciates how I might go about, you know, contacting you.

Got tired old lede based on a trite advertising slogan?

More bad newspaper writing that makes my eyeballs hurt: The “Got _____?” lede. The original “got milk?” ad campaign is bad enough, but to see its udder-tainted influence afflicting the brains of newspaper reporters is worthy of an Official Hartnett Brand Writing Whinge™. Stupid, lazy, meaningless. Not much more to say about it.

Previous installments in this series of annoying writing habits include the “call it” lede, the cop-talk phrase “person of interest,” inappropriate use of “award-winning,” the very rarely accurate use of “in a wide-ranging interview” and that all-time king of writing fail, “to be sure.”

Call it the award-winning person of interest

Just getting this on the record: I still personally hate anyone who has ever used a “Call it a/the case of …” lede (including, unless I’m very much mistaken, myself many years ago in a weak and foolish moment). Also, “person of interest” is a stupidly meaningless and especially annoying example of cop talk that should never be used again ever by anyone anywhere. Too, descriptions of anyone as “award-winning” without an explanation of which awards and their relevance to the story at hand are dumb and only a poopy-head would use them.

That is all.

Actually, this is all: I hate “to be sure” and “in a wide-ranging interview,” too.

Imagery acquisition date in Google Earth: Now that’s a useful feature

There’s some pretty cool stuff in the just-released version 4.3 of Google Earth, just as there were lots of interesting treats rolled out last week in the latest version of Microsoft’s Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D. Without a doubt, though, my favorite addition to Google Earth is the inclusion of imagery acquisition date. Just roll over an area on the map and the date the image was taken shows up in the status bar.

Careful readers will know that I moan pretty much constantly about the age of Google’s coverage of my little corner of the world, to say nothing of the quality of their geocoder. Not only does it frustrate me personally because, among other things, my neighborhood is just a vast expanse of sand in Google Maps, it also is professionally frustrating over at Backyard Post.

Here, for example, is a neighborhood in which the developer started closing on condo units in November 2006. It, too, is just a bunch of sandy nothingness in Google Maps. Same deal here, here, here, here, here and so on. Thanks to the new imagery date feature in Google Earth, I can finally attach a date to my moan: Jan. 20, 2005. That’s when coastal Palm Beach County was shot. April 2006 for Martin County, and April 18, 2004 for much of St. Lucie County.

I fully intend to continue moaning about it, but at least now I’ll be better informed.

Why is it so flippin’ hard to find the street addresses of newspaper buildings on newspaper web sites?

Granted, the difficulty I have finding street addresses of newspaper buildings while working on Paper View Monday updates doesn’t exactly top the list of life’s great injustices. It is, however, incredibly annoying in a low-grade way that, like so many things I complain about in this space, is almost certainly unique to me. Nearly every newspaper site I visit seems to protect the physical location of its office with the sort of paranoid zeal more commonly associated with Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location. Seriously, people, we’re in the communications business. Let’s stop hiding from our readers.

Finish your painstaking work, or delete your painstaking work?

From the Department of Minor Complaints: Why the heck is “Delete Sketch” directly above “Finish Sketch” in the ArcView editing menu? This one has bugged me for years, but it’s only today, having mistakenly selected delete instead of finish three times in a row, that I’m finally flipping out about it. (Maybe I should just chalk this up to an unhealthy caffeine surplus. I am feeling a little extra jumpy.)

Seriously, has anyone else ever noticed and been incredibly annoyed by this? Or is this just yet another item on that long and growing list of things that I alone am bothered endlessly by?

A thought while waiting for an interminable software upgrade to install

What is the logic of the “time remaining” bar in software installation windows? I’ve been staring at “Time remaining: 3 minutes” for exactly 11 minutes while waiting for a software update to install. It is literally impossible to overestimate how immensely annoying I find this. Now it’s counting down individual seconds from 45, except each “second” is taking roughly 15 actual seconds.

Stupid Friday work day between Thanksgiving and the weekend …

Why I hate Wachovia even more than Volkswagen

How could I possibly hate Wachovia more than Volkswagen, for which I have a long-running, well-document hatred? Because Wachovia charged us a $10 fee after a refund check from a company that overcharged us for a painting bounced. Only after strenuous complaint and repeated threats to immediately close our account, which has been open for more than a decade, and take it to across-Charlotte rival Bank of America (which in my experience is not much better and has no shortage of similarly dumb fees) did they make “a special exception to our policy” and remove the really, really stupidly ridiculous $10 fee.

It’s the very fact that the target of my rage was a fee of only $10 that rockets Wachovia past Volkswagen on my personal corporate hate list. All Volkswagen did was build me a particularly sour lemon of what for many other customers has been an outstanding car. Wachovia, on the other hand, is willing, for $10, to so antagonize long-standing customers that they threaten to take their business elsewhere.

I find it helpful in these situations to channel a coworker who I once heard make the following statement in a customer-service showdown with Home Depot: “I’m a very unreasonable man and I just need to be made happy.” On occasions such as this, and only on occasions such as this, I strive to be a very unreasonable man.

I’m with this guy: Wachovia sucks.

Call it the case of the annoyingly overused newspaper lede

Lazy newspaper writing drives me crazy. Trite phrases, pointless thesaurus-diving … I’m getting worked up just thinking about it. We’ve covered “to be sure” and “in a wide-ranging interview,” and lately I’m incredibly bothered by the “call it” lede. Some recent examples of the “call it” lede, followed by the subject of the story:

• Call it a case of life imitating art. (A guy obsessed with street rods.)
• Call it a case of déjà vu. (Separate fires on consecutive days at the same apartment complex.)
• Just call it a case of too many Chiefs and not enough Lions. (A high school football game.)
• Call it the case of the mystery subpoena. (An attorney facing disciplinary action.)
• Call it the case of the disappearing hedge fund manager. (Um, a disappearing hedge fund manager.)
• Call it the case of the disgruntled Michael Vick fan. (Vick fan threatens to blow up local jails.)

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s not “call it” anything, let’s just get to the point of the stupid story already.