Charlotte's Vast White Void

Their desk staff has been cut to the bone, and many of those bones have been broken and await resetting. FYI, there is at least one desk opening and word is it won't be filled. So I feel for those guys. Missing type on a page? Could have been a computer glitch where it appears on your screen, but disappears later in the work flow. It's happened to us, too. Probably caught in an early edition and fixed later, but that's just my guess.

 

You non-subscribers don't know what you're missing. In today's Observer sports section, I particularly enjoyed:

— An AP Red Sox-Yankees gamer as the (big) CENTERPIECE on the day Duke plays for the national championship. They had two decent Tysiac stories on Duke — the 30-incher ran on page 5C; the other on the front.

This is the first MLB centerpiece in many months. They do nothing with baseball. Just not much of a baseball city at all.

— Earlier posts on Raleigh content are spot on. Today's doozie that ran in the Observer had this Butler lede:

INDIANAPOLIS — Cinderella is not here, according to Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.
But it sure does look like it.

(Bonus points to any writer who doesn't mention the slipper-wearing whore in a gamer tomorrow).

 

Look on the bright side. They can hold till midnight for the cover.

 

Trust me, they are. They're the Charlotte Observer, the big boys. Tysiac is a good guy and a great writer. So is Langston Wertz, the prep writer. But some of those guys think they're better than they are. As for them having "only" eight staff writers, they also utilize a lot of correspondents. They are sufficiently staffed.

 

"This big empty white space was put here to remind you of Eric Montross."

Perhaps the Observer felt like emulating the Duke Chronicle many years ago.

 

Does anybody know what day the white space appeared? It's hard to believe somebody didn't catch that. Several years ago, the News and Record (Greensboro) had a headline that read "54pt hedline hery" on an inside page. They also had a paragraph in a story that read in part that Toney Baker's third touchdown of the game made the score 14-14. My guess is they discovered real late that, oops, they had an empty inside page they forgot about and had to do a rush job. It can happen.

 

Awesome

 

College basketball out the wazoo and NASCAR. Sounds like hell on earth.

 

So would this be a vast white-wing conspiracy?

 

It's North Carolina. There's nothing bigger than college basketball and NASCAR there.

By the way, their Web site shows they have two guys at the Masters. Just saying.

 

If they've got two guys at the Masters, they're not hurting in terms of staff size.

 

Augusta's not very far from Charlotte, and the Quail Hollow tournament is coming up in a few weeks. Not surprised they'd have a couple of guys go down to get some advance work done.