A good front page

Ben Shors’ Census story on how people are waiting longer to get married is the top story online this morning, and was well-received by editors. “It was such a great way to do a Census story,” business editor Addy Hatch said.

And for those of you wondering whether Shors will be expensing his bar tab: “I won’t be signing that, I can tell you that right now,” senior editor Carla Savalli said.

Editors were also please at the way the Enron convictions , now more than 25 hours old, played out on the front page. Regular readers will recall that this is an ongoing challenge - presenting important news in a way that doesn’t seem stale by the end of the print cycle. “The headline treatment was just exactly what we needed to do,” managing editor Gary Graham said.

Those pesky kids

This week’s 7 ruffled a few feathers around the table this morning. The issue was display type: A teaser on the cover that used the expression “knocked up,” and a headline inside (“What the hell is a jigowatt?”, page 7).

Graham said the use of profanity in headlines is a line we don’t want to cross. “We kind of cheapen the use of language when we display it so prominently,” he said. “I’m usually pretty liberal about what we allow reporters and sources to say, but display type makes me nervous.”

But what do readers of the section think? It’s hard to tell - we haven’t heard from any. “I think the fact that we haven’t heard from readers today really speaks to the demographic,” Graham said. In other words, what may outrage people from one generation may not even cause the younger generation, i.e. 7’s target audience, to bat an eye.

Watch your language

We’ve rerun the ever-so-controversial Spanish story in English today, to address concerns that English-speaking readers were unable to read the original version. We also talked a bit about having more stories in Russian, which is a bit more of a challenge because it requires publishing Cyrillic characters, which I’m not sure if we’re able to do at this point.

And lastly, a helpful reader from Coulee City weighed in on the Spanish story today. He sent us a copy of the story that he clipped out of the newspaper along with the following thoughtful critique:

How did this crap get into my paper?

¡Muchas gracias!