Hindsight, Feb. 18, 2020

The weekly critique of The Doane Owl and Doaneline

Praises:

Design:

Nearly all pages have dominant art. Excellent.

Most pages are at least 1/3 art. Exceptional.

I didn’t see a gray page in the paper. Outstanding.

Most pages scatter the art well.

Most stories and story packages are rectangles. Yes!

Every story has a headline. Good!

We avoid butting heds.

With just one exception, we use the optimum length for legs of text (2–10 inches) and avoid legs of text more than 20 picas (more than 3 inches) wide.

We use italics, boldface and reverses in small doses. Good.

We avoid placing any graphic element in the middle of a leg of text.

We avoid putting artwork at the bottom of a leg of text. Yes!

Text that wraps below photos is at least 1 inch deep.

When we stack items, we do it correctly — Photo/cutline/headline/text.

In most cases, we run one cutline/photo. That’s how it should be.

We square off cutlines with photos.

We run at least 4 inches of a story before we jump it.

We jump at least 6 inches of each story.

We jump stories only once.

Headline of the Week: Cardinals leave the nest, gain their stripes

Visuals:

The new Greek members graphic tells the story in a glance. Good work.

The faces on the artwork on P. 2 look familiar. Hmmm …

Kassi Blatchford’s Chipotle photo isn’t award-winning, but it gets the job done.

The boxing photo on P. 7, the larger one on the right, is a great shot. Good work, Caitlyn Nelson.

Other graphics in the paper are useful. They do the job.

Graphic of the Week: Greeks by Nishesh Yadav.

Photo of the Week: Boxer by Caitlyn Nelson.

Writing:

Kudos to Bailey Roberts and Kate Weinandt for tackling the Academic Strategy story. It’s a difficult story to tell. It contains a lot of moving parts, details and nuance. But the two did a good job. Outstanding reporting. I salute them.

Glad to see Forensics won awards. Thanks, Caitlyn.

Interesting piece by Caitlyn Nelson on Doane art students attending grad school at Fort Hays. Sounds as if Doane has a pipeline there.

Thanks to Josh Bundy for explaining why the Greek system is not for everyone.

Good column from Chandler Farnsworth on the KDNE. Let’s hope it doesn’t die.

I enjoyed Caitlyn Nelson’s column about her exploits as a reporter.

John Celesky’s column is a Valentine for singles. Well done.

I absolutely love that we did a story about the first woman to play football for Doane. Thanks, Jace Tamayei.

Lede of the Week: Doane football (team?) welcomes Kenisha Jacsaint as the first female to join the team. To tell the truth, this lede needs a little work, but it’s the best in the paper this week, in part because of its significance.

Problems:

Design:

Headline hierarchy? I don’t see much evidence of it.

Write better headlines.

Avoid articles in headlines. Replace articles — a, an, and, the — with commas.

Text should be less than 3 inches wide but wider than 1.5 inches.

Story packages should be shaped like rectangles. The Fort Hays piece and photos fails to qualify as a rectangle.

Avoid placing a photo on top of an ad. We fail that rule on P. 4.

When you have two photos with a story, run one photo big for impact. Make it dominant — substantially bigger. Show the contrast.

Run one cutline/photo to avoid confusion.

Watch spacing. On the QR code and again on the Sports page, our type runs dangerously close to rules. Build in some points of space.

Consider a deck for stories that carry short headlines.

Write headlines, even for Letters from the Editor. Use a logo to designate it as a Letter from the Editor.

Who the hell doesn’t like newspapers?

Who the hell doesn’t like Nike the Husky?

The baseball story and photo also are not in the shape of a rectangle, but this is allowed when you’re working around an ad.

Visuals:

Two many Execution at Dawn photos. Purge them from the paper.

Is there a reason we fail to ID people in photos? See the forensics photo, for example.

While the Greek members graphic is the best in the paper, a few of the names, especially Kappa Phi Zeta, are tough to read.

Why don’t we have a mug of Jennifer Torres?

Both sports photos have problems. The shot of Kenisha Jacsaint is too grainy. We couldn’t get our own shot of her doing something?

The baseball photo is out of focus. The dugout is in focus, but the batter isn’t.

Why is the cutline on the baseball photo so long?

Why is the boxing cutline so short — and fails to ID the boxer?

Writing:

We need better ledes on stories.

Hard news stories need ledes in past tense, not present.

Avoid burying the lede. To me, the lede of the Academic Strategy piece isn’t that Doane is considering hiring the group — though that needs to be high in the story — but about the doubts Doane has about the group. Even if we lede with the school that became a success story, the piece would be more compelling, IMHO.

Here’s an example of how the first six grafs should read:

A firm that Doane wants to hire has receommended faculty cuts and elimination of programs at other colleges.

Academic Strategic Partners of Golden, Colo., may be hired by Doane to help the university list its top priorities as Doane faces an uncertain financial future. The Board of Trustees will discuss the matter — and perhaps hire the firm — later this month.

But Doane’s representative of the American Association of University Professors isn’t sold on the idea.

“If the ensuing discussion is meant to involve faculty in helping to spend financial resources wisely then I think there could be some benefit to the process,” said Chris Wentworth, Doane’s AAUP representative. “If the goal is to decide what programs to cut then I wouldn’t predict any improvements in climate or ‘engagement.’”

That’s exactly what happened at Morningside College in Iowa and Felician College in New Jersey. At Morningside, majors in theatre and physics got the ax after its administration followed a book written by the founder of Academic Strategic Partners.

Felician is listed as a success story for Academic Strategic Partners even though the school was harshly criticized by the AAUP in 2015 after it fired 16 staff members following a study by Academic Strategic Partners.

Read stories for holes or confusion. For example, in the lede story, we quote someone as saying Academic Strategy helps colleges to evaluate their programs and services. Then we quote the same person as saying that the firm has added a “service that is evaluative.” Huh? I don’t get the difference between “evaluate” and “evaluative.” Am I missing something?

In a few stories, we lede with the time element. Why? In general, when something happened isn’t as newsworthy as what happened.

The story about Chipotle and its Guac Mode states that Doane students were unaware of the program. Then why did we write a story?

I read the Mack Hansen story and I still don’t know the relationship between Mack Trucks and Doane.

Please, no “many students” or “most students” ledes. Each lede should be specific to the story. So, in the students who prefer not to rush, I’d lede with “Sophomore Matt Pracht decided …”

Also, try to omit “there was” constructions from your writing. Try to write in active, not passive, voice.

Use “said” when attributing information to human sources. If “said” is the lede verb, as in “Chevalier also said …” the following verbs must be past tense as well.

You must attribute quotes.

The editorial contains a convoluted 47-word sentence. Why? And what were we trying to say?

Omit phrases such as “was able to.” Instead, write: This weekend, I attended the …

Break up long sentences.

We wrote a wonderful feature story on a woman playing football for Doane and we failed to tell our readers what position she plays? Seriously? Don’t you think that’s kind of important?

Wait. Let me get this straight. The baseball team played four games last weekend at home and we failed to attend them? WTF?!? That’s literally your job — attend events, write about them.

Omit needless words.

Style:

Avoid abbreviations unless everyone knows what they are, such as FBI.

Do we use courtesy titles? No? Then why do we have them in this paper?

What style will we use: 2-dimensional? 2-D? two-dimensional? We have it at least two different ways in separate stories.

Long titles — titles of more than three words — should be placed after the name.

It’s 9 million, not nine million. Numbers greater than nine are expressed as numerals.

Use “because of” to show cause/effect; use “due to” to depict arrival and departure.

Use before, not prior to.

Grammar:

Punctuation goes inside quote marks.

Avoid adverbs.

Singular nouns deserve singular pronouns. Not their, but its.

Avoid very. It is the most worthless word in the English language.

Doaneline:

Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see anything new on Doaneline.