Rottenchester

This morning, in the paper edition, you devoted an entire page explaining why yesterday's metro edition reported that 12 miners were found alive in West Virginia.

Karen, I understand: your paper fucked up like the rest of them. You didn't need to print a picture of 20 other newspapers' headlines to prove your point. And you sure didn't need to compare your paper to the Los Angeles Times - that made me snort OJ through my nose because I was laughing so hard. (I'm still feeling the burn, btw.)

But, Karen, if you really want to do something to make up for your mistake, let me suggest a different course of action. Call up the Associated Press and ask them to write a story that answers these questions:

• Have mine accident rates gone up in the past five years, while the number of citations for mine safety violations have gone down?


• How many other mines have received a huge number of citations like the Sago mine? If there are a lot of them, are the feds going to do something like, say, shut them down until they improve?

In other words: if you are really concerned about your reputation as a journalist, act like one and do some reporting. Instead of making the story about you, do something that might make a difference. You can't bring back 12 dead, hard-working family men, but you can at least figure out if it looks like another dozen are going to get killed in some other poorly-maintained mine this year.

And don't call your readers "news consumers" like you did today. That's both awful prose and condescending. We're readers, with brains, who think. We're not baby birds, waiting patiently with mouths open, willing to choke down whatever pap you choose to regurgitate.