Rocky Mountain News has it all

I always tell students that everything needs to be edited -- not just the stories but the info graphics and captions as well. So I was pretty horrified to find not one but several errors in a slide show at the normally very well edited Rocky Mountain News. The March 5 edition has a link for Photos of the Day. One caption calls the subject of the photo a "former Manuel High graduate." Once a graduate, always a graduate, as far as I'm concerned. The second problematic caption appeared under the photo of Gov. Bill Ritter's son and wife. There were two big problems with this one, and they've both been fixed . First, whoever edited the caption included the following intro: "Lede in bold." Those are the directions. They were supposed to write something and didn't. Oops. Also, the editor did a good job of checking the spelling of the names of the people pictured. How do I know? He or she typed in "cq" after each name. CQ indicates that something has been checked. I learned to do this at the top of the file, not in a place where it can be published, but this might be difficult when editing for the Web. I wonder what kind of problems this creates for editors on a daily basis. The caption also contains an AP style error. It refers to "Governor Bill Ritter." AP says that governor should be abbreviated and capitalized before a name, as in "Gov. Bill Ritter." I assume the Rocky follows AP style, but if this is wrong I hope someone will let me know.

But the Rocky is an outstanding news organization that won a Pulitzer last year. If you haven't seen the paper’s fabulous 33-part series recounting a school bus-train accident that occurred in 1961 in northern Colorado, you're missing out. It's entitled The Crossing, and it's not only well written, it's got some great video and still photos. There's also a great discussion board about the piece, with comments by survivors as well as other readers.