No sense of humor

The newspaper where I work ran an April Fools' Day page in its Sunday paper in honor of April 1. All I can say, really, is that no matter how good the humor seems to be, running fake stories in a newspaper just rubs me the wrong way.

A newspaper lives and dies by its credibility. Joke stories, even when bleedin' obvious to the reader, put a seed of doubt in the readers' minds about the paper's honesty. If the paper can make this up, a reader might say, then it can certainly make up other information like, say, budget figures, crime statistics or police reports.

Now, this doesn't mean that a paper shouldn't print satire, for example. This type of writing, a la Swift's "A Modest Proposal," has a place. It's called the Editorial page. Clearly marked as Opinion, these pages are perfect for comments and views.

I also retain a distaste for April Fools' Day antics because I was the focus of some in college. The fraternity-staffed newspaper did an edition of the paper and modeled it after Pravda. I was, unfortunately, a large part of the it (and I wasn't consulted so the nasty attacks came as a surprise to me that day!).

All that was part of the physical threats, the vandalism of the college newspaper office (we now call that malicious destruction of property, probably a misdemeanor) and having my dorm room door burned (nowadays, we call that arson and is a felony) that came from fraternity folks at the college. Looking back, I should have filed police reports with the real police, not the college.

Thought: To quote a fellow newspaper person: "Hindsight is 50-50."