Halloween Fun & Games

Alright, it’s Halloween and you're feeling the spirit of the holiday, but you're stuck in the office. No worries. Here is another time waster sure to get you in trouble with the boss, the IT Department, and the person in the cubicle next to you.

Ben and Jerry’s has a Halloween themed game area on its website that features a drumming skeleton, very cool. You can also carve your own virtual pumpkin, not as cool but hey, it’s free.

Saving the best for last, it’s the Undead Smackdown. Picture, Wack A Mole meets Night of the Living Dead. This game gives you a score, so feel free to stop back and tell us how you did.

It’s all very G-rated so enjoy and Happy Halloween.

Fun and Games

In my capacity as a web guy, I spent many hours today “researching” time killers for people trapped in cubicles all day. There are two games that I wanted to pass on.

One called Smack the Penguin was sent to me by my pal Jim Onderko of North Ridgeville. Unbeknownst to his boss, Jim is an aficionado of various web time killers and some of the best forwarded e-mails ever.

His record for Smack the penguin was 328 feet. Have a go and let us know how you do.

The other game I wanted to show you is Office Hoops. This game is on the Turner Broadcasting website and it’s a lot harder than the game we play in our office. They have cross winds of varying speeds that add a wicked hook to your paper ball.

I had a fairly lousy 3 baskets on my first try. Hopefully, things will pickup as I spend the next few workdays perfecting the drift.

Check back in and brag about your scores, or pass on a few hot time killer games of your own.

Give the Tribe a little respect

Chip Caray, Tony Gwynn and Bob Brenly -- the trio in the booth for TBS broadcasting the Tribe vs Yankees series -- just won’t give their bias a rest. It’s always about the Yankees ready to break through. How hard is it to just acknowledge that the Indians tied with Boston for the best record in baseball and give the team the respect they deserve?

I guess we just need to learn to live with it; some things, it seems, are never going to change.

After all these years I still can’t stand the sight of Cris Collinsworth as he did the same thing to the Browns when he was a broadcaster doing Browns games. The Browns could have scored 250 points and he would have felt the team lacked punch.

Heck, even ESPN – after the Tribe trounced the Yankees in the opening game – saw its announcers talking about how the Yankees pitcher couldn’t hit his spot. Not that the Indians came out ready and blasted the ball – it was all about the difficulties of the pitcher.

I’m not sure what will take to change things. The easy answer is championship teams, but I don’t think even that will do it.

The mistake on the lake, the burning river blah, blah, blah, you name it. People have mighty long memories when you aren’t from a major market team with deep pockets and massive advertising dollars.

Shame on you 19!

You deal with a lot of stereotypes when you are a member of the press. One of the most particularly galling ones is that people assume you want to sensationalize a story.

The story about state Rep. Matt Barrett, D-Amherst, and the photo of a topless woman that popped up during a PowerPoint presentation at Norwalk High School is a great example of how a story can be skewered by those who want to do so.

Here, we ran the story on the front page. It wasn’t our lead story, and it didn’t have a giant “THE WORLD IS ENDING” headline. In our story – which we published courtesy of our friends at The Sandusky Register -- we detailed that Barrett got the portable hard drive from somebody else, and that he requested an investigation from the Ohio Highway Patrol.

It was pretty much textbook coverage -- tell the story in a fair, unbiased way. The fact that it was such an odd story, and one involving a representative from our coverage area, made it worth the front page.

However…..

If you were watching Channel 19 News on Wednesday night, I’d say you saw a perfect example of what NOT to do.

Now Channel 19 isn’t exactly known for unbiased coverage. Its reporters use loaded words -- adjectives that we are all taught in journalism school to stay away from – and if what they are saying isn’t opinion, (again, which we aren’t supposed to interject) then I don’t know what is.

But truly, the channel’s coverage of the Barrett story was shameful and embarrassing to our profession.

As a journalist, there is nothing more frightening than seeing a reporter take a story and fabricate by omission. Sure the facts they put out were true, but leaving out the rest of the story to create a false impression is just as bad as lying in my book.

So -- to use the immortal words of one of the channel’s own promotions -- Shame on you, 19 News.