* News judgment juxtaposition: While it wasn’t stop-the-presses stuff, news that a Tampa employer would be staying put and adding 700 jobs was significant and decidedly welcome. That was the announcement made by call center operator OneTouch Direct. As a result, last Friday’s St. Petersburg Times accorded it
front-page, above-the-fold treatment. Maybe it wasn’t more important than Greece calling off its referendum, Club Empire shutting down or USF Poly planning to split, but that’s how the Times played it. It was an important story.
Notable contrast the same day in the Tampa Tribune. Same news was accorded three-graph “Brief” treatment on the Business page (7) that is affixed to the back of the Sports section. Interesting call.
* The page one (Tampa Bay section) St. Petersburg Times’ story on Monday was headlined “NOTORIOUS” and chronicled the “most horrific crimes in Tampa Bay history.” The “hook” was next week’s execution of Oba Chandler. It was a reminder that there have been other infamous crimes that still haunt us. The worst of the worst were listed and summarized. Heinous, nightmarish acts and the mutants who committed them.
Among them: John Couey, the sex offender convicted of burying a 9-year-old girl alive, and Hank Earl Carr, the escapee who murdered two Tampa police detectives and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper. But between their photos and summaries of their brutal crimes, a photo and accompanying background on Julie Schenecker who police say shot and killed her two teenagers last year. Schenecker hasn’t been to trial yet–and her mental state has been, to say the least, the subject of considerable legal conjecture.
It was inappropriate to include Schenecker in this rogues’ gallery of horrific killers. Not fair to her nor to the jury-pool dynamic.
* As a semantic aside, “notorious,” as we’ve seen, has retained its ill-fame meaning, but “notoriety,” from which it is derived, is now synonymous with fame.
* Anyone else turned off by network interviews, such as “60 Minutes” did with the sleazy Jack Abramoff last Sunday, that are de facto book promotions?