Charles Apple

Denis Finley, editor of the Virginian-Pilot, wrote a page-one column today in which he apologized for reversing the score of the Super Bowl in Monday’s paper:

Finley writes:

How could this happen? Many of you asked that question Mon day in e-mails and phone calls to The Pilot. No, the sports department is not filled with Indianapolis Colts fans. Yes, we proof the paper. No, we did not have a Super Bowl party here.

It was, as simply as I can put it, human error. It’s hard to believe we can make a mistake like this when at least a half-dozen veteran journalists were involved in producing Monday’s Sports section. It’s hard to believe we can mess up what is arguably the biggest sporting event of the year, but we did.

I’ll also note that my old friend Denis felt compelled to forgo his usual smiling mug shot for one that seemed a little more somber:

Find the entire column online here.

In case you missed it yesterday, yes, the Pilot got the scores reversed on Monday’s sports front:

The error is in orange, just beneath the headline:

The Pilot got it right on Monday’s page one…

…but Denis reports it was also wrong on page nine of sports. I missed that one. And I’ve already thrown out my paper, dammit.

I zipped into downtown Norfolk for a lunch reunion Wednesday with two of my Virginian-Pilot staffers, Miranda Mulligan and Bob Voros.

Despite the fact that we’ve stayed in the area, I’ve not seen Miranda since I left the Pilot 14 months ago. I’ve seen Bob only once since then. However, I’ve been in constant e-mail and Facebook contact with them both.

And the fries at Five Guys can’t be beat, of course.

Apparently, it was payday for Landmark employees (below, right).

It was great seeing Bob and Miranda again. I really need to do this more often.

What a delight to open my Virginian-Pilot this morning to find this masterpiece by Buddy Moore:

That’s a fabulous photo, designed with a little interaction with the page nameplate. A terrific headline (including a pun — you guys know what a sucker I am for puns). Two wonderful pullouts down low, including one on the history of perfect games and another on the incredible outfield catch by Dewayne Wise to preserve the win (and yet another pun in the text).

And even the ad across the bottom wasn’t ugly today!

Like a lot of people, we’re in love with this pitch-by-pitch diagram masterminded by Steve Layton of the Chicago Tribune:

The Tribune’s Josh Crutchmer writes at SportsDesigner:

There were about four of us who had the same reaction as soon as the 27th out went up on the board: “Every pitch, to every batter, with every result, no cutting corners.”

Steve Layton, our senior graphics artist, immediately started building a shell, and Chad Yoder and Jonathon Berlin started pulling the data. My role was to give Steve the space to pull it off and make the rest of the page work.

Once we got the data and players oriented correctly, the design was rather repetitive and tedious. One of those deadline graphics made possible by a 1 p.m. game instead of a 7 p.m. game. Steve’s total time spent getting it all right was 6-7 hours.

I’m a little partial to the tab version, because the color adds a lot, in my opinion.

Steve’s work is fabulous — always has been, really. Working with him and observing his sports graphic work was one of the big highlights of my three years at the Tribune in the late 1990s.

You can see a bunch of perfect game sports fronts, A1 pages and graphics at SportsDesigner. Check it out here.

The Virginian-Pilot’s renowned design team will shrink by two next month.

Presentation team leader Paul Nelson announced last week that Ryan Healy will leave the paper on Aug. 28:

Paul writes:

Ryan will be embarking on a new career – watch making. He’ll be attending the Lititz Watch Technicum in Pennsylvania – a two-year school started by Rolex to address the shortage of skilled watchmakers in the U.S. Ryan came to The Pilot in 2005 from the Hartford Courant and before that was a designer at the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

We’re not finding many samples of Ryan’s work online. Here are some pages from a big photo essay on water issues that won all sorts of photo editing and design awards. Ryan was the designer:

See the entire set of pages here.

In addition, Brandon Stuck will depart on Aug. 1.

Paul writes:

Brandon has received a scholarship and fellowship from the Herron School of Art and Design, an Indiana University school and will be getting his masters of fine art in visual communication. Brandon was part of the start-up crew with Link in 2006, and then did a brief six-month stint at Red Eye in Chicago before retuning as a part-time designer at the Pilot in Oct. 2007. He joined the Pilot full-time at the end of March 2008.

A few examples of Brandon’s work:

In addition, we understand Brandon had his appendix removed this week. No word yet on his index or table of contents. Brandon’s wife, Miranda Mulligan, reports he’s recovering nicely and should be home soon.

I’ve lauded the Virginian-Pilot many, many times for its inventive ways to surprise, delight and inform its readers. Just last week, for example, I applauded work on a metro front and for its Michael Jackson front page.

(And full disclosure, to anyone who doesn’t know: I spent four-and-a-half years running the Pilot’s news graphics operation.)

But today, I got up, fixed breakfast, opened up my morning paper and was immediately disappointed by the front of today’s edition:

Yes, that’s a Spadea advertisement, covering half of today’s front page. Not only that, but the right side of the page — the side not covered by the giant appliance ad — is graced with a vertical two-column ad for a building supply company.

You can see a one-column refer rail and part of an elaborate skybox refer above the nameplate. But for real, live editorial copy, all you can see here is one story. And only a few inches of that, even.

Here’s what the paper looks like when you open the Spadea:

Ah, now, that’s more like it.

Note how the hed on the lead story is stacked in the rightmost two columns. That suggests the A1 designer at least knew a Spadea was coming, at least. Smart move.

But does giving the reader such a tiny peek at live editorial copy help sell papers? I doubt it. But sometimes it’s not about selling papers. Sometimes, it’s about selling ads.

Denis Finley, editor of the Pilot, tells us:

Yes, this is a first.  I’m not crazy about it, but it pays the bills.  The best we could do was to get two lively topics at the top of the page to draw readers in.

Most of our single-copy papers are vended, not boxed, so prospective customers are able to peel back the spadea if they want to see the rest of the page.  It’s effective for the advertiser that’s for sure, and readers have the option of pulling it off and saving it, or discarding it.  So it goes.

It’s a first for an ad, but in fact, for several years, the Pilot ran a Spadea around A1 on holidays and at the start of every weekend, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, after all, is a resort area. The idea was to reach out to vacationers and help guide them to cool things to do, besides enjoy seafood and lay out on the beach.

The front of each Spadea was brightly illustrated with plenty of refers and tezes, with special thought given to rack presence:

Inside the Spadea was a small area map, a tip on a day-trip vacationers could take and other things to do across the region — which, by the way, consists of five large cities on this side of the James River and two more on the other side. It really is a happenin’ place, especially in the summer.

Our A1 designers always knew when the Spadeas were running and adjusted their deisign so that the lede headline would not be covered up. They’d sometimes even ditch promos or skyboxes. No sense in putting a teze above the nameplate if nobody can see it, right?

So what’s the difference, then, between running these weekly editorial-driven Spadeas — which the Pilot ran for four years, if I’m not mistaken — and the advertising Spadea that wrapped it today?

I honestly can’t tell you while I like the old Spadeas but not the new. Perhaps it’s simply the old geezer in me coming out. I readily admit, though, that if selling this ad keeps from laying off another of my former staffers or colleagues, I’m all in favor of it. Dammit.

Now, when the Chicago Tribune recently added an A1 Spadea — well, a Spadea-sized ad, anyway — it shrunk down the image of its front page and floated it into the white space to the right of the ad. “Your Full Tribune Inside,” said a big headline:

Not a perfect solution, either, admittedly. Read more about that here.

Find our recent post here about increasingly intrusive advertisements.