Blindness (R)
The Inquirer’s Cool Whip
posted by Tom Namako
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| Find me if you can. |
| philly.com |
If you're ace Inquirer reporter Mark Fazlollah, you've got to be feeling a bit ... upstaged right about now.
Fazlollah's series on racial inequalities in suburban policing practices began yesterday, revealing some staggering statistics and anecdotes: how police are strip-searching arrestees unnecessarily (which is both pricey and unconstitutional), how departments are hiring more and more white officers despite increasing diversity in their towns, and how some nuisance laws are so vaguely worded that a man can be arrested for literally standing in front of his house. This is the news version of meat and potatoes: good, solid, investigative reporting that demands social and policy change.
But if you're a strictly online news consumer (as many [most?!] urban teens to thirty-somethings are) you'd never know Fazlollah's series even existed.
You would think, though, that the Inky and Daily News are running a hard-hitting investigation of a princess television anchor Alycia Lane's latest antics in New York City -- which, in the news world, has about as much substance as Cool Whip.
For the past two days, Philly.com has toggled the same two shots of Lane over and over. Fazlollah's series is relegated to a small box underneath it, with little indication of its importance.
I'd like to say these are the stunningly stupid decisions made by editors in the Internet age, but can we even blame that anymore?
The print edition gets it right — the series is blown up all over Page 1. But when newspaper editors wonder why, oh why, they're losing young, intelligent readers online, they should look no further than their own websites.