Kickers?

What guidelines do you follow when writing kickers for the carousel?

I usually try to avoid repeating any of the words used in the headline, but this tends to lead to vague kickers. Family fun, education, recreation, entertainment, environment and weather are among the kickers I have used more than once. I like to avoid redundancy, but maybe it's more important to be specific. One challenge is the limited space, but I have noticed some kickers that take up two or even three lines. Is this OK?

Since so many others have at least a little bit of experience writing Web kickers, I wondered if anyone would be willing to share tips or tricks. What's the best or worst kicker you've ever written or seen? Are there certain things we should keep in mind if we want our kickers to grab readers' attention?

— Elizabeth

Not sure how to address this

From Mark T.

I have to be honest. I think this is a good place to bring up an error that appeared on the front page of the Stevens Point Journal this week, but A). I don't want to offend anyone, and B). I'm really not sure if there's a procedural way to avoid such a thing.

At any rate, I'm sure a few people already know that the word "pantry" was mistyped during the corrections process in the lede sentence of a story about traffic at local food pantries.

Here's how the sentence was published: "Nationwide, many panties are feeling the pinch of fewer donations coupled with increased need for assistance."

OK, stop laughing. No, really, I mean it. It's not funny, you guys. Cut it out.

Seriously, though, there's no indication on the proofs that anyone checked the corrections after they were made, on a printed proof or by PDF. Even that's no guarantee that someone making such a quick scan would catch a missing letter, but I hope that we are doing that. I also think we ought to take extra time when it comes to front pages.

But what do the people on the firing line have to say about it?

A reminder

I think we had some problems with stories moving from NewsEdit to Publicus over the weekend and I want to applaud those that had to work around the problem to get content to the web.

Just a reminder that when sending stories manually, be sure to include only the first paragraph in the first paragraph box with the rest of the story placed in the second paragraph box.

There are a pair of reasons to do this:

1. For stories that appear in the carousel, or in other positions on our homepage, special sections and sub-pages, this prevents the summary text from cutting off mid-sentence and bumping the "More" that appears at the end.

2. For stories that appear in our e-mail updates, this prevents long, run-on paragraphs that look odd.

Thanks,

Brian

A litle problem

If the world "little" was misspelled "litle" in a headline that was 60 point or bigger, or was in a big fancy font, would you notice?

Would you be surprised to know that this was missed not once, not twice, but thrice on Monday Life covers, by different people (and then subsequently noticed on all three by Dan)?

Heaven knows I've made the same mistake — gone painstakingly through an entire page and neglected to read the headlines. But egad, man, three pages, same headline mistake on all of them.

Take your time, and be careful.

Land of 1,000 Universities

Hello all,

After much debate and a final verdict from Mr. T., we've developed a style for the University of Minnesota. For each campus, treat it like the UW schools (University of Wisconsin — Stevens Point).

Ex. University of Minnesota — Twin Cities

Happy long-dashes!

Sirena

check mate

One of the many things the copy desk does each night is to do a final check of each PDF in the A section of the paper. Ideally, we're looking for headline errors, stories that don't end or other large, type-face problems. Lately, I've been doing a lot of this, and I'm wondering if that's really the best option. The reason I bring it up is that I'm normally responsible for a larger percentage of A-section pages because of doing wire.

We all know that it is harder to spot errors on the pages you produce. You know what's it's supposed to say, so you tend to read over mistakes. While I plan to continue to look through PDFs each night, I think my role should be more of a making sure all the pages are accounted for, so we don't have a situation like last night with the missing WRT 5A.

So in terms of who's best qualified to make a final perusal of the PDFs for quality control purposes, what do we think? Should it be whoever is doing the fewest pages? Should we make a rule that you can't check PDFs of your own pages (this is only for the final look, not to approve the page initially)? Should I check lifestyle pages and someone else do night side pages? Should this task be assigned each day along with the page distribution?

This step is our last defense against errors, so how can we make it better?

--Kristy

Giving props

Today (Saturday) was one of the most difficult days I've ever seen on the copy desk.  When I came in to begin working on wire pages, I found that there was no Wausau masterlink to make pages to begin with.  I wasn't able to start doing wire pages until 4 p.m.  Over the course of the day, we also found that our inability to access the budget Web site was apparently the result of a power outage in Appleton, and we later found that none of our stories were making it from NewsEdit to the respective Web sites, and not all of the pages being released from approval were making it to the printer and the archives.

The day could've been a real disaster, but our talented staff kept its cool, buckled down and still put out a darn fine paper despite our cumulative technical difficulties.  So I have to publicly give major credit to Cathy and Jen Straub for getting a Wausau masterlink made so we could do Wausau pages, and Elizabeth and Tim for their great pagination and proofreading abilities in creating quality pages and getting them out the door in a timely manner.  Props also to Elizabeth, Tim and Dan for manually inputting all of the articles with correct photos and taxonomy into Saxotech, which is, in my opinion, one of the most irritating things in the world when articles won't send.  Kudos all around to everybody who helped us out.  Today could have been a really awful day, but thanks to everybody it was only mildly irritating.

(Incidentally, how exactly does a Wausau masterlink not get made?)