Gag gets copy editor fired

They made him a fake front page, too.

 

It's an unfortunate situation.
I've made a couple dozen of those pages in my day.

 

Fallin'?

 

"The fake intro to the Dr. Laura column was part of a mock-page printed out and presented to Lara Milton, the departing copy editor, as a going-away memento.

"It's a newspaper tradition; you make up a newspaper page (usually page one) with fictitious stories making fun of the departing employee.

"So for Lara Milton, someone did a fictitious 'Dr. Lara' column with Milton's photo in place of Dr. Laura's. The tone of it was meant to be a parody of Dr. Laura's writing style.

"But what someone apparently didn't realize is that if you then use the same text file for the real Dr. Laura column, you have to delete all the mock material; any text left in the file will end up on the website, even that part is separated from what is 'flowed' onto the real newspaper page. It was a total accident that it ended up on the Web."

 

Unless the fake column was profane or libelous, the firing seems unjustified. But, considering the source ... Dr. Laura, who lives there, seems to have a huge sway with McCaw, the publisher.

 

this is fucked up, but is race really an issue here?

 

He may be the only African-American there, but I don't think he's the only minority. The Knight Foundation numbers show between 15 and 20 percent non-white employees for 15 years. No numbers since 2004, but I can't imagine they suddenly got rid of all minorities.

Which is a long way of saying that I don't think race is an issue.

If it were my shop, I probably wouldn't have fired him, but if someone higher up ordered it, I don't know how hard I'd oppose it.

 

Not sure Evel Knievel coulda made that leap. Care to really connect her to this story?

 

Well, he sure couldn't now.

 

About seven paragraphs down...

 

Is there something deeper here? Was he in the crosshairs before? Firing here seems to be a little severe - but not if they were looking for an excuse to shitcan him.

Not to threadjack, but that link gave me some news I missed - that the late Larry Whiteside will be in the writer's wing of the HOF. Good news.

 

Please tell me they called him Spike and that his wife's name was Aggie.