THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601060001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
Question: What do crosswords, Portsmouth tides and Virginia Beach editorials have in common?
Answer: They all either shrank or disappeared last week. And readers let us hear about all of them.
The biggest hullabaloo was the crossword puzzle. To make room for another comic panel, the Cryptoquip was moved from the comic page to the puzzle column on Monday.
It was a bit of a squeeze. And to make it work, the type size of the crossword clues, the horoscope and the bridge column was reduced.
Good intentions, bad results. The puzzle column is a favorite of older readers, and lots of them (I stopped counting after 5 dozen) called to say we had ruined their day, their week and the new year.
``I can't work it without a magnifying glass, and you've spoiled my fun,'' said one man. ``How about going back to that big print so I can read it, please.''
Your voices have been heard. The type is being enlarged - not quite as big as it was before, but an improvement over this week. Look for the change in Monday's Daily Break.
NOT-SO-COMIC RELIEF. Speaking of The Daily Break - many of these callers also let us know they didn't like the new comic strips.
With ``Calvin and Hobbes'' in retirement, ``Mother Goose & Grimm'' made its debut on Monday. Several readers called that day to ask me what it meant. How do I know? Something about an exploding skunk. . . .
I've also been asked to interpret ``Non Sequitur,'' the new comic panel. And why, they ask, don't we ditch ``Mixed Media''?
But the real message from older readers is that the new comics - and even our old ones - are too youth oriented.
I say give them a chance. To me, ``MG&G'' and ``NS'' take away some of the sting of losing ``Far Side,'' and I'm a card-carrying AARP member.
Besides, there's still ``Wizard of Id,'' ``Blondie,'' ``Rex Morgan M.D.''.
EDITORIAL BLANK. You've heard of those cosmic black holes. Well, last weekend, on Saturday, we had a cosmic white hole on the editorial page.
My own newspaper looked fine. But 70,000 subscribers got nothing but a headline (``Virginia Beach: The year in review - the year ahead'') and a pullout.
As far as anyone can figure out, our computers weren't speaking to each other. A page proof had the editorial but somehow the text disappeared by the time it was electronically transmitted to The Pilot's Virginia Beach plant.
Some readers thought the gap was a joke (``Maybe there's no past or future for the Beach,'' said one caller) or that the newspaper ran out of ink. Or that, because they lived in Portsmouth or Chesapeake, they weren't supposed to read about Virginia Beach!
Fortunately, most Beach readers got the editorial in the paper - most, but not all. One who did not was a reader named Meyera Oberndorf. . . .
TIDAL WAVE. The blank spot on the editorial page was visible at a glance. But you had to be a student of the weather page to notice that the Portsmouth tides were missing earlier in the week.
At least a half dozen Portsmouth readers called in and told us, including a city councilman. They can blame it, at least in part, on the federal budget impasse.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which has been providing the newspaper with tidal information for a decade, was shut down before it sent out the 1996 tides data. That I learned from Randy Jessee, our resident technical expert.
In the last minute, Weather Central - the company that provides other Pilot weather data - put together a new tides table for us, computing the data from master stations like Sewell's Point.
But in the hurry, Portsmouth was left out. And Portsmouth does not like being left out.
That's understandable. But if it happens again, you can do some quick math using the Norfolk tides. The formula: High tides for Portsmouth are 11 minutes earlier than in Norfolk; low tides for Portsmouth are six minutes earlier.
HAPPY NEWT YEAR. Several readers weighed in on our New Year's coverage.
One woman thought we should have had ``HAPPY NEW YEAR!!'' in big letters over the top of the paper. She didn't think the small greeting, near the newspaper's name (and with a glass of bubbly) did the job.
Another caller suggested that, instead of New Year's photos taken in Moscow and Paris, we focus on our own cities, like Norfolk and Newport News.
And three others, fed up with the ``liberal press,'' would have been happy had we just left out Monday's editorial cartoon. It showed baby ``Newt Year'' kicking Medicare - drawn as an old lady in a wheelchair - down the stairs.
I can see we're off to a lively start in 1996!
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net
by CNB