(A little OT) Re: "Fog in English Channel: Continent Isolated" antedated to 1931

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Aug 11, 2010, at 6:40 AM, Bonnie Taylor-Blake wrote:

>
> Michael Quinon commented:
>
>> The story belongs with "Small Earthquake in Chile", another apocryphal
>> Times headline (said to have been the result of a competition
>> among sub-editors to find the most boring headline and to have been won by Claud
>> Cockburn).
>
> On the topic of apocryphal headlines, folklorist Sandy Hobbs has a fun
> analysis of "parochial headlines" said to have appeared after the sinking of
> the Titanic (e.g., "NORWICH MAN DROWNED IN ATLANTIC," "TITANIC SINKS: LOCAL
> MAN LOSES POCKET WATCH").
>
> http://www.folklore.ee/FOAFtale/ftn61.htm#titanic

from real life:

when i was a child, some 50 years ago, and worked on the Reading Eagle in Reading PA, every day the staff enjoyed the issues of the Lebanon (PA) Daily News (we pored over local papers throughout eastern PA, including Philadelphia, and beyond -- the Sacramento Bee, for instance -- to see how their coverage of stories compared to ours), because the Lebanon paper was committed to genuinely local news, either stories about local events or local takes on stories from the wider world; they reasoned that people would get more detailed coverage of non-local events from the papers in Harrisburg or Lancaster (both twice+ the size of Lebanon, which is really a pretty small place) or, especially, Reading (three or four times the size, with two papers committed to general news coverage).  the Daily News also had then -- i think it abandoned this scheme some years ago (it's still in business, remarkably, with a web site, even) -- the firm and inviolable policy of printing a giant banner h!
 ead across the top of the front page every day.

the combination of policies resulted in some amazing headlines.  i wish i could recall the Pearl Harbor Day banner (which the Eagle had affectionately saved in its morgue), but it was something like Lebanon Men To Be Called Up for Pacific War!

arnold

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