I was reading my Gainesville Sun last Thursday when I came upon its weekly feature titled News of the Weird. This feature, as its title indicates, relates various stories that its editor/author Chuck Shepherd deems to be offbeat and unusual in nature, picked up through the world media.
Now why did I decide to look deeper into News of the Weird? Last Thursday, one of the articles in it was about how Donald Duck is treated in Germany. First of all, Donald Duck is mainly a print phenomenon there, with sales of "his" comics very popular. Second, German Donald is much more erudite and intellectual than his ordinary "regular guy" American counterpart.
So what, you may say. And I'd agree and not even bother with it, except for the fact that, in delving into "deutsche Donald", I discovered a couple of other peculiarities in how News of the Weird is printed in the Gainesville Sun. On the Net, Shepherd takes stories he gleans from different media sources and cites those sources with the dates of their publications. By the time any of these articles gets to the Gainesville Sun's version of the feature, all citations and dates have been omitted. They do give Shepherd's News of the Weird URL, but I really don't think that encouraging the reader to access the Web for citations that they should have provided is a very good strategy for promoting sales of their newspaper's hard copy. After all, if the website is better, then why read the Sun in the first place?
Take the German Donald Duck article. It was reported on the website News of the Weird on August 30. It gave as its source for the story an article in the Wall Street Journal from back on May 23, more than three months earlier (none of which was revealed in the Sun)! I looked at other stories and found some even older (although there were some that were relatively recent).
Here is my problem with News of the Weird as the Gainesville Sun reports it: I read a story and have no idea where it came from or when it was first reported, so how can I feel comfortable bringing it up in conversation with others? For all I know, the original sources are illegitimate. It reminds me of that Chinese journalist who lifted an article from The Onion and reported it as fact, much to his later humiliation. The oldness of the news also reminds me of a newspaper that circulated around a few years ago: Old News. But Old News was deliberately old, featuring articles portraying significant historical events as ongoing in the present, and tailored to appear like modern newspaper journalism.
I'll leave intellectual Donald Duck to the Germans, danke schön. I much prefer silly, American Donald with his emotions on his sleeve, even though I can never understand a damned thing he's saying!
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I've been a NotW fan for years (at least 10, and probably closer to 15); I'm glad you finally found it.
ReplyDeleteWhat you note is not an artifact of the Sun. It's how the print edition works. I don't think there are source references in any of the print versions.
As to the age of items, Chuck has quite a backlog of these things, so many of them don't make it into NotW right away. Perhaps not surprisingly, there's no shortage of "weird" news.
On the other hand, Chuck does check what he puts in there, so you can be pretty sure that when something shows up in his column, it's real, legitimate news — it did come from a proper news source. Of course, the news source could have it wrong, and I'm not sure Chuck checks alternative sources. I just source things to NotW when I pass them on to others.
Also, he's retired certain topics, because they show up so often that he no longer considers them "weird" unless there's some unique aspect to a particular instance. It's interesting to look at his "no longer weird" list.