Thoughts after my 10 minutes with the paper yesterday and today:
In their never-ending efforts to get readers involved with the news, people involved with the Register's sports section had an embarrassingly-long promotional project yesterday that was headlined BEST OF THE BEST?
I mean, the size of the type was larger than when Nile Kinnick died. Larger than when Troy Davis was invited to the Heisman Trophy ceremonies in New York two years in succession.
I guess it was a slow-news day. When a promotion is announced in the first week of July to pick the best Hawkeye football player and the best Cyclone football player, you know there's not much going on.
It's a dumb question anyway. It sounds like an idea that was hatched at a Friday night beer-drinking session when some guy said, "Let's think of a project that lets Car Wash [that's what newsroom people call Carolyn Washburn, the editor] know we're not laying around, waiting to be sent to the farm department, the mailroom or out of the back door."
The answers to who's the best Hawkeye and who's the best Cyclone were answered in the previous century.
Nile Kinnick [pictured at the right] was the greatest Hawkeye, without a doubt. Hell, they named the stadium after the guy and put a large statue of him in front of the place, didn't they?
Kinnick won the 1939 Heisman Trophy, was a Phi Beta Kappa student and may have become a future president of the United States had his life not ended at 24 on June 2, 1943 in the crash of a Navy plane in the Caribbean Sea.
Troy Davis [pictured at the left] became the best Cyclone player ever when he rushed for 2,010 yards in 1995 and 2,185 in 1996. He was fifth in the Heisman voting in 1995 and second in '96.
Davis was a major reason Dan McCarney rescued an Iowa State football program that was being called a coaching graveyard. For that, Cyclone fans should be forever thankful.
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By the way, make sure you cast your vote in the newspaper's football poll. The sports department can't wait long to get that project in print. Another layoff is coming very quickly at the Register and all other Gannett Co. papers, so the people managing, and writing for, the sports department want to make sure they get the results before the grim reaper comes to escort them to the back door of the newsroom. After what happened to cartoonist Brian Duffy the last time there was a mass layoff, no one is safe.
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That brings me to Rekha Basu's essay in yesterday's opinion section about newspapers. It was headlined Reflecting on future of newspapers. The trouble is, people like Basu aren't part of the solution; they're a big part of the problem. She mentioned some of the daily newspapers that have closed, and wrote about the "layoffs and staffwide [unpaid] furloughs" at the Register. Unfortunately, she didn't offer any reasons why the business is in such sad shape. All she had to do was look in the mirror.
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A headline in today's sports section said Windy City teams get snubbed. Wrong. [The story, by the way, was from the Chicago Tribune]. The Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox got one player apiece named to the All-Star teams. They didn't deserve that. Both teams are very ordinary and don't have anyone who should be an All-Star. All you have to do is watch them play.
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See you later. It's too nice a day to be indoors. I'm ready for my walk.
