Cincinnati "news" (Louisville, Perry: city hall, school, college)

[t45209]

Originally Posted by Sarah Perry

My husband insists on still subscribing to the print edition. It now looks like something sized for a Barbie doll. Waiting to see when they'll again make the pages smaller. Probably soon.

They've already announced that it is going to be shrinking this fall...going to a tabloid format, similar to the USA Weekend insert. It won't even be big enough to wrap fish in anymore.

BTW, I thought it was hilarious that Carolyn Washburn, Enquirer VP and Editor, was named as one of the 20 Professional Women to Watch in 2012. What for? Standing proudly on the bridge of a sinking ship?

[Sarah Perry]

Originally Posted by progmac

we subscribed to the weekend edition of the enquirer. cancelled after one month. i can handle a bit of bias, but what really got me is that they didn't do any real investigations. i grew up on the toledo blade, which is (or was) in a different league compared to the enquirer.

Didn't grow up on it, but for years read the Louisville Courier-Journal every day. Another one in a different league altogether.

[Sarah Perry]

Originally Posted by t45209

They've already announced that it is going to be shrinking this fall...going to a tabloid format, similar to the USA Weekend insert. It won't even be big enough to wrap fish in anymore.

BTW, I thought it was hilarious that Carolyn Washburn, Enquirer VP and Editor, was named as one of the 20 Professional Women to Watch in 2012. What for? Standing proudly on the bridge of a sinking ship?

I contacted Ms. Washburn via email once over some particularly egregious print error. Her response was disheartening, to say the least. Self-serving excuses.

[abr7rmj]

Originally Posted by WWW12344

And since they've forced the use of Facebook to comment we can't even have a discussion to get the real story on anything anymore.

A pathetic embarrassment to the city of Cincinnati.

What does Facebook have to do with the so-called "real story"? If anything, requiring legitimate Facebook accounts and, therefore, a real name has significantly cut down on the cynicism, blind hate and other nonsense that permeated the Cincinnati.com comments section for too long.

Now, if you're not willing to stand behind your thoughts next to your real name, you can't post. A 100 percent improvement.

I will say this though, as I'm a former news editor of a daily paper out West: The Enquirer is a shell of its former self in just about every way possible. When the Cincinnati Post was around, the Enquirer was forced to uphold certain standards in order to compete for single-copy sales and, by extension, advertisers. Unfortunately, with the Post's demise, so too came the downfall of the Enquirer. Its print product is mostly AP stories in a generic USA Today page format, its copy editing/headline writing/page design is subpar and isn't even done in Cincinnati anymore (or by people who know and understand Cincinnati), and it has severely cut down on the number of local journalists it employs to cover our region. I doubt they even have Columbus (state capital) or Washington correspondents anymore, which most legitimate big-city papers have.

What you're left with is a desperate publication that goes for stories such as the streetcar, knowing it can milk both sides' emotions to keep an inflated story going as long as possible. The days of getting any sort of real, fair and unbiased investigative journalism out of the Enquirer are long, long gone. And unless Gannett sells the Enquirer, I doubt they'll ever return.

The Enquirer's Saturday front-page "graphic" on the the odds of winning the Powerball drawing is an example of how cheap and subpar the paper's print product has become. Designed and placed on A1 only to attract single-copy buyers in stores/gas stations etc., the entire package is a non-story complete with a couple of odds they got in five minutes from a Google search. It was amateurish at best and a city this size deserves better.

Frankly, the Enquirer is a bad paper. But I can count on two hands the number of truly great American dailies that remain. Here are a few: Denver Post; Virginian-Pilot (especially for design); New York Times; Washington Post; The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer; St. Petersburg/Tampa Bay Times ...

For those interested in newspapers from across the country and around the world, check out this awesome site. It has every paper's front page every day and it'll give you an idea of just what we're lacking here:

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp

[abr7rmj]

Originally Posted by goyguy

"Ditto" to all of the above!
What also irks me (and lots of other people) is how geographically challenged the reporters and editors are.
A firefighter was injured while helping to put out a house fire on Portman Ave in Bond Hill. The Enquirer article said the street was in Roselawn.
There is a Charles St in Wyoming as well as in Over-the-Rhine. An Enquirer story told of someone's being mugged in Wyoming. But the incident actually happened on OTR's Charles St.
Just the other day, a person was struck by a train in the 8000 block of Vine St. That's where an overpass crosses Vine between DeCamp Ave and Caldwell Dr. It's in Hartwell and not, as the Enquirer placed it, in Carthage.
I'm not as savvy a geography nerd where the west side is concerned, since I was raised on the other side of the sauerkraut curtain. But the paper probably gets locations wrong pretty often in that part of town too.

If I had a dollar for every time a short semblance of an article ended with words along the lines of, "more as this story develops" only to find that nothing more is ever written...dinner for this entire forum would be on me.

That rag is one of the strongest arguments for a two-newspaper city I can think of. RIP Cincinnati Post.

The reason the Enquirer gets these facts wrong is because the paper is no longer copy edited in Cincinnati by people who live here. It is edited in a regional Gannett office in Louisville by people who have never lived here and wouldn't know the difference between Roselawn and Hyde Park, let alone Roselawn and Bond Hill.

This outsourcing of jobs is an awful trend in American chain newspapers, led by Gannett, and it significantly diminishes the quality of the product. How can we expect people to accurately edit stories about Cincinnati when they don't know the first thing about the city?

[t45209]

Originally Posted by abr7rmj

What does Facebook have to do with the so-called "real story"? If anything, requiring legitimate Facebook accounts and, therefore, a real name has significantly cut down on the cynicism, blind hate and other nonsense that permeated the Cincinnati.com comments section for too long.

Sorry if you got your feelings hurt reading honest comments. Do the names Publius, Silence Dogood, and Novanglus mean anything to you? I would venture to say that great minds like Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams would disagree with you. Anonymity allows people to speak their minds, when it would otherwise be imprudent to do so.

Why don't you change your screen name on this board to something we would all recognize?

[abr7rmj]

Originally Posted by t45209

Sorry if you got your feelings hurt reading honest comments. Do the names Publius, Silence Dogood, and Novanglus mean anything to you? I would venture to say that great minds like Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams would disagree with you. Anonymity allows people to speak their minds, when it would otherwise be imprudent to do so.

Why don't you change your screen name on this board to something we would all recognize?

This board is a lot more civil than the juvenile rest-area bathroom wall that was the old Cincinnati.com.

I think it's been generally accepted by the majority of users there that the change has been for the better.

[Sarah Perry]

Originally Posted by abr7rmj

This board is a lot more civil than the juvenile rest-area bathroom wall that was the old Cincinnati.com.

I think it's been generally accepted by the majority of users there that the change has been for the better.

I guess it's better if you only consider the preference of the small percentage of prior commenters who're still there. I believe the situation here is more or less identical to the test markets where Gannett first instituted the FB policy. Almost everyone just quit commenting.

[Sarah Perry]

Originally Posted by goyguy

...There is a Charles St in Wyoming as well as in Over-the-Rhine. An Enquirer story told of someone's being mugged in Wyoming. But the incident actually happened on OTR's Charles St....

One of my personal favorites is when they mix up Blue Rock Street in Northside with Blue Rock Road in Colerain Township. That also makes for some pretty interesting "misunderstandings."

[Sarah Perry]

[quote=abr7rmj;22950307]The reason the Enquirer gets these facts wrong is because the paper is no longer copy edited in Cincinnati by people who live here. It is edited in a regional Gannett office in Louisville by people who have never lived here and wouldn't know the difference between Roselawn and Hyde Park, let alone Roselawn and Bond Hill...quote]

Thanks for this clarification; it explains (although does not excuse) a lot.

Now, if you could just clarify for us why you think people should not be able to post under pseudonyms on cincinnati.com, when I must assume that your legal/actual name is not abr7rmj. What name do you post under there?