Missing the Point

No, no. I came to this story from a link, half-expecting to, I don't know, read a story about someone forgetting something important, or getting lost walking down the hallway. But no. It's about union seniority issues. Cute shouldn't complicate or mislead, which is what this headline does now. It doesn't serve accuracy or SEO requirements or anything else.

Senior moment costs NY Times in arbitration

THE New York Times' management was dealt a setback in its effort to cut staff after the troubled newspaper company lost an arbitration hearing on allegations it tried to rig the union's seniority rules in order to lay off workers.

In a bid to make firing easier, the Times management had been arguing that if a unionized member switched departments at the paper, the member's seniority would reset to zero at the new department.

The Newspaper Guild told its members Monday that arbitrator Martin Scheinman rejected that notion.

Instead, Scheinman ruled in favor of the Guild, supporting the view "that seniority used to determine Newsroom employees' vulnerability to layoffs must be measured by their service in the entire News Department."

"They lost, as they should have on that one," said one veteran editor, who is not in the union. As a result, total length of service will determine seniority.

Set Aside SEO and Train for Accuracy

Arriving home after about a 300-mile roundtrip to a field hockey camp, I found this headline and thought, wow, I missed a good story: The missing soldier has been found. Alas, it was not to be.

A headline should never get ahead of the story: the soldier hasn't been found; Pakistan is helping the United States to look for him.

Pakistan helps U.S. find captured soldier

By Julian E. Barnes
As part of a warming partnership between the two countries, Islamabad has shared intelligence on a soldier captured by Taliban militants.
With a confidence boost provided by a series of operations against militants inside Pakistan, Islamabad has stepped up the intelligence and military cooperation provided to the U.S., and to a lesser degree Afghanistan, in the last six months, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. military drone flights into Pakistan, designed to help collect intelligence against militant targets, have resumed, and the information is being shared and analyzed with the Pakistani military at the Joint Coordination Center at the border Torkham Gate in Afghanistan, American officials said.

Officials differed on the value of the intelligence Pakistan has shared on Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, who was captured by Taliban militants in Afghanistan on June 30. One senior defense official acknowledged that Islamabad had provided intelligence, but cautioned not to overstate its value.

And I do not mean to be snarky, though I am angry when I say this, but really, newspaper editors: Instead of spending a lot of time training working, capable editors in search-engine optimization, how about teaching the web site people who are often not really editors to write accurate, sensible headlines? Or make sure those qualified editors who are now doing double duty for the print edition and web site have the time to do their job well?

Wouldn't the results be better? We've got the training exactly backwards if there is to be any hope at all of retaining the value of journalism as we know it today. Reporting and editing are not like hand grenades, where close is good enough.