The Pulliam family sold his Central Newspapers to Gannett in 2000 for $2.6 billion cash. This week, I've been catching up on a recent ruckus at the Star, over a Page One prayer some viewed as anti-semitic. The story comes via Indiana blogger and former Star journalist Ruth Holladay, in this excerpt:"I've always been fascinated by the Star's bygone days, and the charge of anti-Semitism hit a nerve,'' Holladay writes in a recent post. "When I first started working there, part-time on the copy desk, I wrote a headline that had the word 'Jew' in it, as in 'Jews celebrate Passover.' The slot man, the late Dutch Eggert, threw it back at me.
"You have to rewrite it," he said. "Mr. Pulliam doesn't like the word 'Jew' in a headline."
Huh? Dutch amplified: "He doesn't like the word 'snake' either. No snakes and no Jews."
In Little Rock, no 'stories'
Charles Portis, author of the 1968 best-seller True Grit, recalled Heiskell's quirks, in a 2001 interview with University of Arkansas oral historians. (Gannett closed the Gazette in 1991, five years after buying the daily from Heiskell's descendants.)
"We couldn't use the word 'story,'" Portis said. "It smacked of fiction. Mr. Heiskell said the proper word for a news account was 'article.' And we couldn't use 'evacuate' as of a building or a city being evacuated. He thought it might remind readers of a bodily function. I don't know what softer word we used. There can't be many synonyms for 'evacuate.' And no photographs of snakes or other vermin, with those same sensitive readers in mind. And we spelled 'Tokyo' with an 'i' instead of a 'y.' But I sort of liked those quirks."What words and photos does your publisher or TV station GM ban? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.
[Image: yesterday's front page, Newseum]
When I worked in El Paso, which was a Gannett paper then, the Executive Editor kicked by a graphic about our minor league baseball team, the Diablos. The graphic had fire and a pitchfork, which smacked of the devil. Of course the name of the team (Diablos) means devils. God knows what he was thinking.
ReplyDeleteThis was the same editor who wouldn't allow photos of firefighters with hoses because they reminded him of penises. Seriously.
Good times.
When I was with the Vero Beach Press Journal in the late '80s (independent them, part of Scripps' Treasure Coast group now), the owner/publisher forbid plane crash news on Page 1. Piper was a major employer in town. And the illustration on the flag included a plane, which, in the event of an air tragedy, came off the page. I'm told that, despite the proximity to the space center and simple common sense, he had to be talked into allowing the Challenger disaster to go Page 1...
ReplyDeleteAt our 12K Thomson paper, the publisher berated a writer on the floor for using the word 'paradigm' in a story - 'you need to write for an eighth-grade audience!'
ReplyDeleteFive years before Google was born, it took a little while but someone found a standard eighth-grade vocabulary list, and paradigm was on it.
The day that publisher left, every locally written story had the word 'paradigm' in it, used correctly. Who knows what the readers thought if they noticed, but the newsroom loved it.
There was a (long-gone) newspaper in NJ that didn't run Heathcliff, or later, Garfield, because the publisher's wife hated cats.
ReplyDeleteThe Charleston Daily Mail in W.Va. couldn't publish photos of any dead body, under orders of the publisher.
ReplyDeleteIn an Idaho Statesman newspaper story, I once compared Boise's economy to a "bacchanal" -- an orgy. The next day, the publisher appeared at my desk, saying she found the story interesting, but had to look up that particular word. She left the impression that looking up a word's definition wasn't one of her favorite things to do.
ReplyDeleteYears ago we would use words in heds to try to stump the publisher; he was not, um, very bright. And there was an edict back then that the sports guys not run pics of male basketball players shooting baskets because you could see their hairy armpits.
ReplyDeleteBack in the days of newspaper morgues, I worked at a paper where the librarian filed stories on menstruation under "diseases, women."
ReplyDeleteAnd at the Daily Mail, no pictures of outhouses, either.
ReplyDeleteThat's only one of many problem areas with Pulliam. He delayed construction of Phoenix's freeway system for decades with his head in the sand front page editorials along with controlling an editorial page to the right of Hitler. His heirs destroyed what was left of The Arizona Republic by selling it to Gannett.
ReplyDeleteTwo stories - In the early 1980s the Gannett paper in Lafayette, Ind. had an editor who believed the word "said" should only appear at the end of a sentence. The logic was it was a "nothing" word and so it should be shuffled to the rear of the sentence.
ReplyDeleteNot the worst rule, but it made for some convoluted sentence construction.
Story #2 - Not a Gannette paper, but one of the Fort Wayne, Indiana papers had a publisher who had several strange edicts. Among them: You could never use the word "cop" because it was disrespectful to law enforcement (which made writing one-column brief heads sometimes difficult).
He also had several rules about Indiana University's legendary basketball coach. 1) Coach Knight must always be refered to as Bob, not Bobby. 2) No photos of Knight with his mouth open. You have to have lived in Indiana during the 1970s and '80s to appreciate what a challenge that was!
This was the same publisher who well into the late 1980s refused to allow the newspaper to have a TV critic and complained when too many reviews were run. TV was competition for the newspaper and we didn't need to give them free publicity was his argument. Too bad he didn't realize that battle had been fought and lost a quarter-century earlier!
I wonder how much Gannett paid for the APP and it's properties?
ReplyDeleteThere have been so many banned-word edicts over the years at the Republic. Where to begin? Former editor who now works in Ohio banned the word limbo because a reader told the editor that he (the reader)didn't know the meaning. Legend has it, the conversation took place in a bar. Another top exec banned use of acronymns in headlines. Normally not such a bad idea, but UCLA? Come on! Oh,and an editor who left for the Bay area (not Bushee) banned the use of semicolons. "People don't speak in semicolons." That's just the tip of the iceberg.
ReplyDeleteI worked for a non-Gannett paper where I was not allowed to include the real name of anyone playing Santa Claus. They said if a child read the real name of a Santa it would destroy their innocent belief and inform them that Santa isn't real. I tried to argue that if a kid is smart enough to read the paper they should be smart enough to realize the flaws in a story about a man with flying reindeer, but it was a futile attempt.
ReplyDeleteOur recently retired editor at a non-Gannett paper here in Texas banned pics of armpits and pics of people getting shots. Why? Because he, personally, didn't like to see either one.
ReplyDeleteWhen The Olympian was still with Gannett in the early 2000s, the word "snafu" was banned. Why? Because of its etymology as a military acronym that, depending on who was doing the defining, could contain the f-word. And I don't mean "fouled."
ReplyDeleteNo idea what the situation is there now.
Weird. I had a publisher for 10 years (pre-Gannett "career") who had the same ban on snake pictures.
ReplyDeleteEven when an escaped 8-foot pet python kept showing up in the basements of businesses all over downtown. WTF? Do the publishers have a professional courtesy clause with the reptile order?
Had to put a name with all dogs---even the narcotic sniffing canines---in photos and stories.
ReplyDeleteWhen I worked for Eugene Pullium at the Arizona Republic in 1960, we could not use the word television to describe someone. When we wrote a story about a local man who owned a Phoenix TV station, we had to identify him as the owner of a jewelry store, even if he was speaking about his TV station. Gene Autry (also a Phoenix TV station owner) was always a movie star when he came to town. And, Jack LaLanne, who had a popular TV fitness show at the time, came to Phoenix strictly as the author of a book.
ReplyDeleteI was told that Pullium thought if it wasn't talked about television would go away.
The publisher of the Arkansas Democrat (now the Democrat-Gazette, of course, thanks to Gannett's bailing out of the market after running the Gazette into the ground) forbade the use of the word "vomit." I can't remember how we got around the citizens advocacy group Victims of Malak's Incredible Testimony, though.
ReplyDeleteThe paper's executive editor banned the use of "neo-Nazi" & "racist," possibly because both were pretty close to describing certain aspects of his politics. (The word "wetback" was, however, a "colorful Americanism." No, I'm not making this up.)
Also, men could not, by definition, be raped.
I lived in Little Rock during the last years of family ownership of the Gazette. The paper was spectacularly well-reported, written and edited, but seemed somewhat out of touch with its actual readers and was undoubtedly the ugliest metropolitan newspaper in America. If I had been a photographer there in that period, I think I would have had to stay away from high window ledges.
ReplyDeleteAnd then Gannett came along, and slapped a generic redesign on it (making it admittedly look better)...but it also killed a lot of the best editing and writing. The paper's tone also also went from elitist to lowbrow in a very short time. It failed there and eventually moved back up the scale a few notches, settling in what I thought was a decent place after a few years...just in time to go out of business.
The current Democrat-Gazette is a far better paper than most mid-metro areas could ever hope for, but the Gazette at its best was something very special. I miss it.
READING ALOT OF HORROR STORIES ABOUT PENSIONS. IS THIS IN ALL CASES, BOTH LAIDOFF AND RETIREMENT?
ReplyDeleteIF ITS RETIREMENT I WOULD SUGGEST THE FOLLOWING: INFORM GANNETT YOU WILL BE RETIRING THE DATE YOU RECEIVE YOUR FIRST PENSION CHECK. WITH THE PENSIONS FROZEN PAY OR TIME IN SERVICE DOES NOT MATTER.