Friday, September 05, 2008

Hyphen-envy?

Miami New Times editor Chuck Strouse engaged in a bit of stretch in a blog post Thursday when writing about the new content sharing agreement between the Sun-Sentinel and the Herald.

Chuck starts off with this line: "The Sun-Sentinel screwed with Miami Herald readers this morning. Or so it seemed."

His post talked about the Herald's first use of a by-lined Sun-Sentinel story in its pages and then climaxed with Chuck castigating the Herald for dropping the hyphen in the Sun-Sentinel byline.

My guess is that Chuck was implying that copy editors at the Herald were somehow striking back at their former arch-enemy Sun-Sentinel by **GASP!!** leaving out the hyphen in the paper's name.

I left a comment that poked fun at Chuck for nit-picking. Chuck didn't approve my comment, and in a bit of self-censorship he deleted the line in his post about the Herald dropping the hyphen.
He did, however, leave this line in his post: "Was this a twisted joke?"... rendering the original post an incomprehensible mess.

Readers are, no doubt, now scratching their heads and wondering: "What joke is he talking about?" And he never explains how the Sentinel "screwed with Herald readers..."

There once was a time when Miami New Times was right on target with some its critiques of the Herald. But this post by Chuck is downright silly...and a little weird.

I just picked up a copy of New Times today. The paper is now down to 72 pages from an average of 80 pages.

But it wasn't too long ago that the paper averaged a fat and sassy 132 pages. But that was then and this is now.

Chuck; you've got your own share of problems over there at the New Times Tower.

Probably best not to worry about how the Herald has misplaced a few punctuation marks! Just sayin'!

1 comment:

  1. News flash for Chuck Strouse.....it's no longer the Sun-Sentinel, it's the SunSentinel, mashed together and no hyphen. Just pick up the damn paper and you'll see it like that in print on every single page. You can even get to the website without the hyphen now (though it still redirects to the hyphenated homepage). Think how much money the absent hyphen will save the struggling Zell empire in ink savings alone over 12 months -- probably two or even three dollars.

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