Packaging counts. I've said it before, I'll say it again: Packaging counts.
Bad wrapping plagued a few good articles this week. On Thursday, Michelle Ruiz gave readers a thorough, spirited feature on Sun-Da and Dragana Katalina-Sun, the husband-and-wife team behind Marco and Luca's, a.k.a. the Downtown Mall dumpling window. Ruiz told the story behind the restaurant's inception in a direct, well-written manner. Unfortunately, this lively story was paired with a dull photo and boring layout.To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, show me the dumplings! I wanted to see the concoctions that drive the window to success. I want to see the couple cooking and selling and being successful like Ruiz so wonderfully expressed them to be. Instead, readers got one posed photo. No dumplings, no customers enjoying said dumplings. Just a blah photo and text following.
The same happened in Wednesday's Focus section. Josh Goodman and, especially, Riley McDonald, clearly put a lot of time and research into their pieces on recycling at the University. Readers learned impressive stats like the whopping 12,186 tons of waste the University created last year, as well as the depressing fact that 7,533 tons of it did not get recycled. Readers were treated to two informative graphs demonstrating recycling percentages and total waste produced, but the facts were illustrated in rather unexciting, gray graphs that served to replace the photos I wanted to see.Where does the 12,186 tons of waste go? I want to see where the trash trucks venture after they nosily empty the dumpsters. McDonald and Goodman's written words conjured pictures in my head that I wanted to see illustrated. Show me the garbage, the recycling plant!
(And what's with the randomly bigger font size in the Focus and Life sections? Augmenting point size for some parts of text may work in some layouts, but why for the entire story?)
On Thursday, another recycling article (this time in the Health & Science section) suffered the same malady. A scientific approach to recycling got illustrated by a huge drawing of the recycling symbol, a recycling bin and a newspaper in front of a few bottles and cans. The drawing looked rushed and served little purpose other than to fill space. As an ardent recycler (the Commerce School bus stop newspaper bin gets quite a fill from this reader), I'd love to see what happens after my papers get tossed in the green bin. Where do they go? What does a recycling plant look like inside? How do my Cavalier Dailys and Washington Posts become new paper? Please, photographers, show the readers!
Insert Sabato comment here
Oh, Mr. S, clearly I jest.
In Wednesday's paper, one oft-quoted University figure provided an amusing behind-the-scenes column on the weekend's Wake Forest football game. Coach Al Groh gave politics maestro Larry J. Sabato the opportunity to serve as "guest faculty coach," and Sabato reported back much insight about the very real students that don the blue and orange. Interestingly, Mr. All-Things-Politics avoids discussing the politics surrounding college athletics (he concedes this in relation to the professionalization debate), but that's OK; he instead humorously and thoughtfully personalizes the men in uniform. He reminds us how we often forget that these hard-bodied folks can be much more than the negative stereotypes with which they're sometimes labeled. Certainly Sabato on the sidelines turns out to be an interesting perspective.
(Mysteriously, the "J." was dropped in the byline
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