Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

As I promised a couple days ago, here are the first two installments of the Herald Boo-Boo Watch wherein we take a look at the careless errors made by Monterey Herald since editing and production was moved out of town. Parts 1 & 2 are being combined since they both appeared on July 18th. Part 1 was on Page 1, and had me asking "100 miles south of what?" Click image to enlarge. press Esc to return. Part 2 was a USGS earthquake hazard map on page 6. At first glance I assumed the darker areas were higher risk zones and lighter shades were lower risk zones. Then I looked at the key and realized the top two shades were the same. So were the fourth and sixth shades. And the third shade from the top was lighter than the fifth shade. Evidently the original USGS map was in color and the Herald converted it to black and white without accounting for the fact that different colors can show up as the same shade of grey when converted. Click image to enlarge. press Esc...

This is my third entry in a row regarding the disintegration of the Monterey Herald which has been taking place over the past four or five months. In February and March "Dismantle-it First Media" (as I now call the Herald's parent company) consolidated critical functions with other papers in California. So we no longer have a local editor, that's being done by a guy in Santa Cruz now, and production moved to Chico so the paper is being assembled by people who don't know the territory at all, which means they can't catch mistakes that are obvious to Herald readers. Ever since these changes were made I've noticed a significant number of careless errors in the Herald of a kind that were rare or nonexistent before the changes. In early June I saw the exact same article with the exact same headline on two facing pages. One had a picture and an extra paragraph at the end, but otherwise they were the same. The next day two other articles were reprinted from ...

Since 1985 I ha v e written roughly three to six letters per year, plus a handful of guest commentaries, to the Monterey Herald. All but one or two have been published. I've also had letters published in the Carmel Pine Cone, Monterey County Weekly, USA Today, and the Christian Science Monitor, so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. In many cases editors have changed a word or phrase here and there, but for the most part my letters have been published pretty much intact, until now. I have never before had a letter so thoroughly butchered in print as the one published in the Herald last Tuesday, July 8th.   I've been hesitant to submit a letter to the Herald for a few months now. From the day former editor Royal Calkins disappeared I noticed that our local daily had been printing fewer letters than ever before, and much shorter ones, too. I suspected the new editor Don Miller was doing a hatchet job on reader submissions, and I was right.   Here's the le...