Iowa: New York Publishing’s Jew.

Yeah. It makes no sense at all, does it. She did right to hang up, because you sounded like a pathological loon who can’t distinguish an offhand slight from millennia of holocausts and persecutions. I have no doubt you’ve further colored her view of what Iowa’s like.

How did this connection even make itself in your mind? I mean beyond the obvious Godwin mistake…*what*? To what address should your remedial history reading be shipped?

Totally flabbergasted,

Amy

I responded in the comments.

Like you said, why can’t women focus more on being powerful and independent. We say men no longer have any control over us in this century. But, in reality men control so many aspects of a woman’s life!

For example, going out to the bars with some girlfriends. Is it really about going and having fun with your friends? Countless hours are spent picking out THE perfect outfit or having your makeup subtle but myseteriously sexy. All of this for what? To get some ass of course! Why else would a woman go through with the stress of looking perfect for a night on the town. If your with your girlfriends I’m 100% positive they have seen you at your worst, so obviously your not all glammed up just for them. It’s all about the possibility of meeting someone.

So really people need to realize men still control a lot of what a woman does or doesn’t do. Wake up ladies, do something for yourself and not a man. After all hasn’t that been the whole point of the Women’s Rights Movement? Are we wasting all of that hard work, regardless of what century we are in?

Will this conflict of dominance between men and women ever end? If so how?

It would be a problem if journalists were identifying people who live here as “from Chicago,” but that’s not what we’re talking about. Here, it’s used as a descriptor.

Also, using place in a headline can also help other news organization pick up on a story happening elsewhere that might be relevant to it.

Like yesterday the Quad City Times posted a story about a teen (a white teen) charged with vehicular manslaughter after allegedly driving while intoxicated. We hadn’t reported on the new development (we had reported on the fatal crash), and because of that, we saw we needed to report on it.

It was the same case when we saw in a Jackson Hole paper that a Cedar Rapidian died while rafting in the snake river. The deadline helped us see that story.

Even if helping other newspapers isn’t the goal of newspapers, those headlines do. And, yes, they increase page views, which I don’t think is a bad thing if done ethically (because yes, journalists do need food and shelter). Also, it gets the information to more readers, and isn’t that the point of journalism?

But I will say that I don’t think everyday crime stories are all that important, unless they have to do with an immediate danger the public faces, i.e. a serial killer still on the loose.

I wouldn’t read many of those stories if I didn’t have to write them. But that’s a whole different conversation.

I do not know if headlines “need” to be specific to be “effective.” Effective in what? You say, information, I think Pratt is saying effective to get web hits, to get readers, to get ads.

Another cultural explanation of why putting Chicago in headlines is effective, such as your example of crime here and murder there, is that it attracts attention to the mythical understandings of urban crime, the urban scene of Chicago.

And what meaning is behind that someone is from somewhere? That is the whole question. I do think, though, that we are coming at this from two different perspectives. And I appreciate that.

I think this quote is especially interesting:

“It sucks when readers make their own assumptions about stories, but I don’t think that editors should give the public less information just to prevent that possibility.”

Do journalists have the only meanings of stories? Readers can’t make assumptions or have their own understandings? And, what if they DO?

We seem to know (or think we know) that people have assumptions of Chicago. Do we as journalists share those assumptions? And if not, the readers’ assumptions may still stand. Do we ignore them?

As Richard said, headlines need to be specific to be effective, and furthermore, hometowns are identified in all news stories – not just those about crime – to tell people who they’re reading about. If the man in the story, Jimmy Powell Jr., weren’t identified as from Chicago, readers could think that it was a Jimmy Powell Jr. Maybe from Cedar Rapids (though I’m not sure if there is one).

That’s why I wrote this headline:

Chicago man’s sentences vacated in Cedar Rapids check fraud, Chicago murder
Did I assume the guy is black? No – I just wanted to let people know that the dude was from somewhere other than Iowa, and to explain why the guy also had committed a crime elsewhere.

Or just look at these other headlines I’ve written , which have nothing to do with crime, blacks, or Chicago. Location prominently factors in many of them. Like “North Libery man indicted on child pornography counts” – it’s not a commentary on the town of North Liberty.

And without a mugshot in a crime story, how would the reporter even know the man was black? How do we know now if Powell was black? Since that story has no comments on the KCRG website, it seems like you’re the only one jumping to that conclusion.

It sucks when readers make their own assumptions about stories, but I don’t think that editors should give the public less information just to prevent that possibility.