Missing the big picture

OK so we pointed a gun at a Bible today.

Please see all of my previous posts about how sometimes we don’t get the larger picture, and the design is not cohesive. Our front page proved this today. (You can see the pdf by visiting today’s front page.)

The truth of the matter is, I bet there were no serial commas on the front page, but there was a Taser pointing at the Holy Bible. Sometimes editors criticize the little things more than the big things or vice versa. And this was one of those times that it went through a lot of people and wasn’t caught.

Editor Brittany Kress definitely made the right comparison: Today on the opinion page, Associate Editor Matt Zapotosky criticized the juxtaposition of an e-mail from our vice president of student affairs (Between the Lines: Mass e-mail insensitively combined student death, drink), but we had a juxtaposition in our own front-page design. This isn’t completely uncommon, as newspapers often have a hodgepodge of unrelated material lumped together on a front page.

Sorry that I sometimes only seem to post things when we are wrong, but that’s usually when things are the most interesting. Besides, weird conceptual errors aren’t able to be corrected, and so this blog is kind of good forum to talk about those weird things — doilies, guns, racial references, etcetera.

OK so if you didn’t notice, I’m sorry to call your attention to it. I don’t think The Post will burn in Hell, but we could probably be more careful next time.