Publisher's Notebook

Newspapers base their success on hustling news and selling ads. (And on selling subscriptions, but this item is about the other two).

News and advertising in a paper don’t always jibe. Take this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch as an example.

The Metro section has a story about a U.Va. student charged with murdering his father. The alleged weapon was unusual – a 4-pound bowling pin, a memento of a birthday party.

(If you take a bunch of kids to a bowling alley for a birthday party, the honoree gets a free actual bowling pin. All the kids who attended sign it. We have one somewhere in the garage or the attic).

The bowling-pin murder story jumps to page B-8, where you’ll find the end of the obits and the crime log.

Then turn the page. On B-10, there’s the jump of a story and a big, half-page, four-color ad for … Bowl America. “You can be a star at Bowl America,” the ad says. Get info at www.bowlingparty.com.

Boy, that was close. The T-D’s production team was either very alert or very lucky. You be the judge.

The obituaries column in any newspaper, including ours, tends to be pretty sober and sobering.

But from the obits in the Richmond Times-Dispatch yesterday, here’s one that will make you read it twice.

A guy who was 67 passed away. The obit says he “was beamed up by Scottie Friday, August 27, 2010, after a long courageous battle with cancer.”

A serious Trekker? Maybe, but once you learn his name you understand.

His name was Danny Kirk. His nickname: “Captain.”

From the Headlines I Wish I’d Written Department:

Some headlines are so bad, they’re great. The award today goes to the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal likes to feature an offbeat human interest story at the bottom of its front page. Today’s entry is about art of butter sculpting, in particular the butter carving competition at the Minnesota State Fair.

The headline: “When It Comes to Butter Carving, There’s No Margarine for Error”

It’s July and we’ve made the turn on 2010. What were the biggest news stories on our website during the first half of the year? In order of popularity, here you go:

1. Fifteen lawyers leave LeClairRyan. …to start a securities law boutique firm.
2. Wise County judge no longer hearing cases. We broke this story last month. Still ongoing.
3. Dress Codes: What is the prevailing view on associates’ appearance? Last month’s web poll garnered a record response.
4. Court Jester: Johnston explains ‘Why Judges Wear Robes.’ Campbell County’s Sam Johnston published observations from the bench.
5. Law firm sues for unpaid fee…gets it all! A stop-the-presses result from Henrico County.
6. It’s now official: The ‘Shaggy defense’ is a term of art. Slate Magazine picked up on this one.
7. LeClairRyan lobbyists jump ship. …to join the Richmond office of a Pittsburgh firm.
8. Griffith: Mims leads the field for high court. We wrote it Jan. 4; Justice Bill Mims was elected in March.
9. Couple not reconciled by ‘accidental sex.’ Not much more can be said, or needs to be said.
10. Former judge accuses prosecutor of lying in court. In N.C. federal court, ex-federal judge Walt Kelley took a U.S. Attorney to task.

The award for most appropriate headline of the day goes to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (see graphic of today’s front page, at right). The headline writers used one word – Gone. – to sum up the departure of Cleveland Cavaliers player LeBron James, who announced on a hyperventilating ESPN show last night that he was signing a contract with the Miami Heat.

I’m not a pro basketball fan, but I am a newspaper fan. The Plain Dealer’s front page is well done. I have to admit I liked the editorializing in the graphic, an arrow pointing to James’s finger: “7 years in Cleveland. No rings.”

I’m surprised the page wasn’t sponsored by that new (and very real) website: www.fyoulebron.com. I won’t link to it, but type in the URL and it says, pretty plainly, what you’d expect it to say.

Cole Porter, by way of Ella Fitzgerald, had it right: It’s too darn hot.

This morning the Danville paper has the news you need, a story with advice from an air conditioning expert on how not to blow your system during this infernal heat wave.

Don’t move the setting on the AC back and forth. Put it at one temp and leave it. Most AC systems will cool your house or office 20 degrees below the temperature outside. If it reaches triple digits again, in other words, the best you’re going to do is about 80 degrees. Take it and run.

What are they teaching in school these days?

Up at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, you can learn about the nine amendments to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights.

Nine amendments? Yep, at Albemarle High, they apparently don’t have much regard for that first one.

Here’s what happened last month: The student newspaper, The Revolution, published an editorial by the incoming editor.

The principal, Jay Thomas, didn’t like it. Some of the faculty didn’t like it. So the papers were destroyed. The principal’s rationale: There was a typo in the headline, and he was worried about “the impact” a controversial article would have on the author. The paper was reprinted two weeks later without the offending piece.

So what was the controversy? Did the new editor, Ellie Leech, advocate the legalization of marijuana? No. Did Leech write about teen pregnancy or, say, back the distribution of condoms? Nope again.

She wrote that student athletes who participate in school-sanctioned sports should not be required to take physical education classes. The piece, entitled, “Student’s P.E. groans might be warranted,” is available here.

Apparently the P.E. department at Albemarle High interpreted that as criticism, squawked and set in motion the destruction.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1988 decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, ruled that public high schools can control, even censor, the content in student publications if the action is “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

Courts have cited the Hazelwood test to stop articles in high school newspapers on the two topics cited above, drug decriminalization and teen sexual activity.

And here? Well, the principal, Thomas, cited the typo (Sean Cudahy, the outgoing editor, admitted the word “warranted” was misspelled in the original paper) and concern for the writer. But Cudahy told The Hook, Charlottesville’s alternative weekly, that those reasons were not aired at a meeting with Thomas and Kim Aust, the paper’s faculty adviser. And Leech said she wasn’t worried about the “impact” of any controversy and that she could take the heat.

Aust defended the school’s action by noting that the piece caused a “disruption to the educational process,” particularly in P.E. classes. Potentially a valid reason, but Leech’s pen is pretty powerful if it can stop gym class with a single stroke.

Adam Goldstein, a lawyer with the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, told the Charlottesville newspaper, The Daily Progress, that this is “one of the silliest censorship cases I’ve ever seen.” Cudahy and Leech would have a good lawsuit, he added.

Proof that the students at Albemarle High may have more common sense than some of their elders: Both students said they do not plan to sue. They also said nice things about Thomas and Aust, even if they disagreed with what they did. Cudahy, who graduated, will study journalism at American University. He’ll have quite a tale to tell when he gets to college.

Thomas, Aust and the P.E. department have to be glad that this all went down just before the summer break. In prepping her story menu for the fall, Leech actually can breathe just a little easier. She now has a lead for her first issue.

Aust called the episode a “good learning experience” for the student journalists. Perhaps, although you’d have to ask the students exactly what it was they learned.

All this was going on at a high school in Charlottesville. Wait a minute. Isn’t that where Thomas Jefferson came from?

Scanning the news sites this a.m. for stories for the Daily Alert…

There it was in the Charlottesville paper - a story way out of step with the current stretch of 90-degree heat and 150-percent humidity:

Federal snow aid arriving

It’s about time.

I was watching a baseball game the other day on TV when a batter popped up a pitch.

“Infield fly rule,” one of the announcers was quick to say, as if that explained it all.

You can look it up: The Infield Fly Rule comes into play if there are fewer than two outs and there are runners at first and second or the bases are loaded. Any playable pop fly within the infield is an automatic out. Why? It would be easy for the infielder to say, oops, my bad, and let it drop, then pick up the ball and start a quick double play on baserunners who thought the ball would be caught. (See picture for how this might look).

Since a number of conditions have to converge, you don’t hear the Infield Fly Rule called very often. But watching this game made me think of something I heard back in law school — that some guy actually once wrote a law review article on the Infield Fly Rule.

Yep, there was a note published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1975 entitled, “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule.”

It starts off, rather elegantly, with the line, “The Infield Fly Rule is neither a rule of law nor one of equity; it is a rule of baseball.”

For eight well-footnoted pages, the author slyly discusses the rule with the high tone and seriousness of purpose one finds in most law review articles. But he is, remember, talkin’ baseball.

The guy who wrote it, according to the New York Times, was William Stevens, who died two years ago. Apparently no one had ever had fun in a law review article before Stevens; one observer said Stevens’ little baseball note started “a cultural revolution.”

Well, a revolution among those who write law review notes, anyway.