Front pages of the Athens Ga. shooting; the Myrtle Beach fire
We’ll expand our look at Myrtle Beach fire papers to include the shootings Saturday in Athens, Ga., where a professor of marketing — who works with the school of journalism, no less — is the subject of a nationwide manhunt after allegedly shooting three dead, including his wife, in broad daylight yesterday.
It caused a bit of a logjam for the hometown Athens Banner-Herald, a Morris Communications-owned daily with about 32,000 circulation. The city also hosted a giant annual bicycle race Saturday, plus two University of Georgia players were selected in the first round of the NFL draft.
Despite all this, the Banner-Herald — the first paper to give me a full-time job, back in 1986! — made the right call. It refered to the other two stories across the bottom and blew out the shootings on the front.
The photo of the local SWAT team was definitely the picture of the day. You don’t see that every day in downtown Athens. Credit staffer David Manning with that one.
The two big photos down low, frankly, don’t add much to the package. The one on the left shows the county coroner watching investigators at work, but the one on the right shows a SWAT officer entering a local building, searching for the suspect. We’d argue that it’s not as compelling as the truck photo. Push it inside and consider dumping the photo on the left. Use the space for thumbnail bios of the victims or a chronology of the afternoon’s events.
Despite the fact that the accused is a university professor and he’s still on the loose, no other paper in Georgia played up the shootings. The Augusta Chronicle stripped the story across the top, with that same SWAT team photo:
We’re completely baffled by today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Athens is only a 90-minute drive from Atlanta (less, if you drive the way my wife drives). This huge, huge story got only a few inches at the top of today’s A1, with a mug shot of the accused:
We’re wondering about the judgment being used for the Sunday AJC. Is actual breaking news no longer important to the Sunday paper? The AJC’s massive redesign launches Tuesday. We’ll find out soon enough.
Let’s slide a few hundred miles to the east — back to coastal South Carolina, where the huge fire this week in Myrtle Beach was front-page news. Unfortunately, the hometown Sun News – which did superb work this week — didn’t post their A1 at the Newseum today.
However, we do have the Charleston Post and Courier, kindly sent to us last night by the gracious Tim Thorsen:
Tim writes he designed today’s page:
We’ve again dropped the rail we normally run in the first column to open up more space for fire coverage. We went back to our normal Sunday skybox, after backing off the space we normally devote to it during the week. My guess is that we’ll be back tomorrow, with regular skybox and rail.
The hed, which I love, was a suggestion from the reporter, Tony Bartelme.
Not only is Tony’s hed a good one, the deck ain’t bad either:
Maybe the most amazing statistic — no deaths or serious injuries
The photo — by staffer Grace Beahm — is perfect as well. That’s a local man, Adam Cumbo, searching for valuables in the rubble of his father-in-law’s home. He’s taking a lunch break, eating on the remains of the family car. Incredible.
Nice work, Tim. All the Charleston papers this week were quite nice, in fact. Thanks so much for sending us your pages.
The State in Columbia, too, has done some fine work this week. Here’s their Sunday front, turning the focus to a longer-term issue:
The only other South Carolina paper we could find running the fire as a centerpiece today was the Herald-Journal of Spartanburg:
The man in the lede photo — shot by Willis Glassgow of the Associated Press — is using a plastic kitchen collander to sift through ash in search of his mother-in-law’s class ring.
Yep, you guessed it: That’s Adam Cumbo — the same guy having lunch on the front of today’s Charleston paper.
April 27th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Thanks for the kind words.