This Sunday’s Eagle features a story about grocery stores selling outdated items.
Some story ideas come from readers. This one came from our daily brainstorming session where we talk about what’s going on in the community.
At a recent meeting, Michael Roehrman, our copy desk chief, mentioned he had gone to a grocery store to buy microwave popcorn and found several boxes on the shelf advertising the 2005 movie “Madagascar.â€
He began checking other items and found several that were past their use by, best by and sell by dates.
We began checking area grocery stores and how they are regulated.
Deb Gruver reports on what we found.
Jean
A reader wrote to our publisher this week to express her disappointment in our coverage of the U.S. Open tennis tournament. "When are you going to get an editor in the sport’s
section who knows that the world’s biggest tennis event is the U.S. Open and that some of the most beautiful and challenging tennis matches are being held this week? Yesterday there were masters at work in that sport and all it deserves is statistics in a #2 font."
I responded by thanking this reader for her comments, but took issue with her suggestions that all we’d printed were hard-to-read stats from the tournament: "The U.S. Open does hit during a busy time in the world of sports, when many of our readers are counting on us to cover college football and local high school sports, and the U.S. Senior Amateur golf tournament. But we try to keep readers posted on the highlights of the U.S. Open beyond just statistics. We’ve published stories and photographs every day of the tournament, including yesterday (Monday) with a story on our sports section front about the Williams sisters’ matches and other results. Today we ran a story on James Blake losing to Tommy Haas. Sunday we had a story about Sharapova’s third-round loss. Saturday, we ran a story and photo from Djokovic’s marathon match against Radek Stepanek. I know our coverage is probably less than a die-hard tennis fan would like to see, and we recognize that we may not be a tennis fan’s primary source for tournament news. However, we recognize that it is a significant sporting event, and we don’t ignore it."
She wrote back unappeased, suggesting that we expand our sports section by two pages to include more on the tournament. "Also try covering the DAVIS CUP or doesn’t anyone in your department know what that is?" Sigh. I have to say, sometimes I think sports editor Kirk Seminoff has one of the toughest jobs in the newsroom.
Theresa