USA TODAY - Oct. 21

October 21, 2014

            On the front page I rewrote the lead for “Fed ends an era of easy money” to say: “Despite stock market volatility and global economic troubles, the Federal Reserve upgraded its view of the U.S. economy Wednesday as it ended bond purchases that have supported growth since the 2008 financial crisis.” My rewrite puts the time element closer to the verb and eliminates use of “on” before the date. The graphic in the bottom left corner is misleading in today’s issue. It appears from looking at the graphic that pirate was the most popular costume in 2005, while witch is the most popular costume in 2014, however, the graph is actually meant to represent how many people are actually planning to buy costumes this year compared to how many planned to do so in 2005. This graphic could have been designed better so it won’t have the potential to mislead readers.

            On page three in the “What’s Happening Online” sidebar, I deleted “Defiant” from the teaser “Defiant Ebola nurse rejects state of Maine’s quarantine rules.” The whole teaser seemed to be evoking an opinion about the nurse, and newspapers should be objective even in online feature teasers. Also in the Halloween snow story, there was a widow that should be eliminated. The news update insert about Ebola in the nurse story worked very well to provide more information in the same context.

            On page 6, there is a story about WV elections and the location given for the story is Washington—I was unable to verify how they come up with those locations, I thought it should be the location which is being discussed, but perhaps they are looking at it as news from Washington, rather than West Virginia. I guess that would be something for the editors to decide, however, the comparable story next to it on the page (also about Senate elections in Georgia) lists Atlanta as the location. In the story, it refers to West Virginia as being part of the South, and I looked it up, and West Virginia is actually in the North-Central region of the country.

            Page 7 has a widow in almost every story. Obviously, widows are not a big deal to USA TODAY, but they look sloppy and most newspapers try to avoid them. Also, the headline for the top story has more than three spaces after the first line. The cutline for the photo of the Uruguay President uses “last Sunday,” I deleted the “last.” Then in the brief at the bottom of the page about Russia’s cargo delivery to the space station they use the numeral 3 where it should have been written out.