Today's Daily News: A Page Full Of FAIL

It's nice that, because I am a Philadelphia Daily News subscriber, each day the newspaper is on my doorstep when I leave the house. (Especially now that I'm actually awake every morning to go to work.) It irks me, however, that in order to have it on my doorstep so early in the morning they seem to have a printing deadline of midnight, or earlier. What this means is, stories about any night games played on the West Coast are guaranteed to not be in my paper. Worse, there have been times when games played in the Eastern or Central time zones were not covered or, at best, a very short, bare-bones wire service article was published. There was one time when a two-paragraph AP story was all that appeared in the paper for a 76ers game that didn't go to multiple overtimes (or even one, if I recall correctly) -- and was played in Philadelphia.

Modern technology doesn't help them put together a newspaper more quickly, it seems. Until recent years, it wasn't quite so bad. Now it seems more and more prevalent. It also leads to errors. And one page in today's paper was a doozy.  First, note the date of the paper and check out the photo and caption in the first two photographs (click on them for larger versions).

Somehow a photo from the Raiders-Chargers Thursday night NFL game from last week ran in this spot (along with the caption correctly identifying Carson Palmer) instead of one from last night's Jets-Broncos game. This is typical, by the way: run a photo from early in the game and tell the reader to go visit philly.com for the result.

If that isn't enough, check out the top of the page (above the headline for the article about an NFL player who isn't so Jolly now that he's going to prison for six years ). "Philadelphia Marathon"? Now, the marathon is on Sunday and there was an article in the regular sports section about it, and that page included the same ID at the top. This, however, was a page in their Eagles Playbook, a weekly insert previewing Sunday's game. All the other pages in the section are correctly labeled.

Between this and things like the spelling errors I see much too often, it really seems the Daily News needs to step up their game. I won't even go into their replacement for the thin Saturday paper, Sportsweek, which has some good feature-length stuff but also contains drivel such as: an advice column from Charles Barkley, Ed Rendell's regular weekly snoozefest column and, last week, an item in which a writer not normally in the sports pages...and I'm not sure this is relevant, but it was a woman...asked a 16-year-old pro soccer player (Zach Pfeffer of the Union) questions like "How do you get to practices?" (Answer: he drives now, but before that his mom drove him. Yay.)

I guess it could be worse: they might make a "Dewey Defeats Truman"-type flub and...oops, too late.