Crappy free newspaper
Apparently residence in the suburbs north of Atlanta comes with a subscription to a newspaper distributed by mail, the Northside Neighbor. As far as I can tell, it’s free to residents living near the neck of Fulton. It sucks. I can’t find a copy editor listed among their staff, and it might explain a few of these excerpts:
Zingo’s drivers actually take a individuals home in their car…
Shoppers looking for a simple striped scarf can hit the malls but if they want something different like karma spray then Sandy Springs is the place to shop.
…the NBCA has never requested traffic calming studies through his office, but might have asked for the studies through another outlet in the city.
I admit that number three is questionable. I use the guidelines from Lyne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which state that you can only get away with such a comma splice if you’re famous. The confusing flow of the sentence is further highlighted by its position in a correction that occupied about 5 column inches on the front page.
I’m not terribly concerned that I’m receiving a poorly-edited weekly newspaper by mail—there was a monthly tabloid in Smyrna that I also ignored,—but its choice of a broadsheet format, especially considering how inconvenient it is distribute by post, says to me that they’re trying to be a legitimate source of local news instead of merely a couple of pages of ads and an article on what the Protestant churches are up to this week. Still, it seems uniquely useless. Even the opinion page, which I was hoping would be a source of poorly-rationalized entertainment, also failed to rise out of the mire of mediocrity. It had two stories that read like news, one feel-good story about some guy who made furniture and died recently, and one actual editorial about that air-marshal who shot that guy. It feels like they’re not trying.