I'd say the same to you given you can't seem to understand how a person could keep their job after using "Shithole" in a headline.
At our shop (15K daily) we went up the chain of command. We asked the ME and he asked the publisher. Shithole stayed in the AP story, but not the headline.
You realize for every metro newspaper, there are about 100 mid-size and small community newspapers right? So, show me some mid-size or smaller newspapers that used it in their lead headline.
This is what 90 percent of newspapers did. But JCT doesn't think so and he thinks they all should have put shithole in the headline. smh.
Don't print it. Why offend what's left of your readership when you don't have to. Everyone can figure out what word is being censored.
I've always said if it's worth reporting on, spell it out. It's part of the language. If it seems gratuitous and you can paraphrase and avoid it, that's fine. If it adds valuable colour and impacts the tone of a quote, use it. And if it is the story, as "shithole" was, you have a duty to use it. Like others, I'm not sure I'd blow it up in a headline, but I'd definitely run it.
While I understand the debate over whether or not to print verbatim a presidential obscenity or vulgarity, I don't understand what circulation numbers have to do with it. Are small town residents somehow more delicate? More pious? More refined? Are theirs not the very kitchen tables around which the administration claims these phrases arise? Do they not deserve an accurate representation of what's being said and done in their name?
Then you don't understand how journalism and small town politics work in middle America. But, then again, that's why the media has been wrong about a lot of things for about two years now.