Good Weather and Newspapers

The weather has finally calmed down here in Louisville, as it has in St. Louis as well...and things have actually dried up fairly quickly around where I live (far from the river, but near the largest creek system in the city). But just like in St. Louis, flooding has been a serious problem this week, and near the Ohio River it is still bad.

But that's not the point of this post. A week or so ago, our local newspaper, the Courier-Journal revamped their website. However, when you revamp a website, I thought it meant you were going to improve it. While the site is a bit better, it looks basically the same. I have always thought the CJ was a subpar newspaper anyway. I realized that in the first few months I lived here. I've never seen a newspaper with such bad editing...there are dozens of grammatical errors in it every day. I also have a serious problem with what they consider front page news. I remember a few months back a tragedy occurred at my alma-mater. I went to the CJ website to check on updates, as new details were becoming available every few hours. The story was fittingly on the front page of their website. However, when I looked on that site an hour or two later, I was disturbed to see that this bit of news had been replaced by the following headline: "Cards, Hoyas Picked First in Big East." Yes, a legitimate news story had been replaced by this: not even a score or a final standing, and U of L hadn't even been picked as the sole pick for first. This story had been replaced because U of L men's basketball was one of two teams coaches had picked as the preseason favorite to win the Big East. Is that front page news?!?!?!

While I know the St. Louis Post Dispatch isn't the greatest news source in the country, I have to give it props for keeping legitimate local and national news as their top story on their website. Local sports teams only take that spot when they actually DO SOMETHING, and it has to be significant, like win a championship or, in rare cases, sign a big name player.

As of this writing, the first story you see when you log on to Courier-Journal.com is that Western Kentucky beat Drake in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The second story you see (the stories scroll between 3 or 4 headlines) is "Guards Need to Find Their Shooting Eyes." You've got it, another basketball PREVIEW. On StlToday.com, you see a story about the flooding in St. Louis. You would think that the flooding around here would be a story, but I guess all the rabid Cards fans here in town don't want to have to search too long in order to read about how U of L will walk all over Boise State. But I'll leave the final decision about the better newspaper up to you:

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage

http://www.stltoday.com/