Herald By A Nose

The Palm Beach Post’s Mark Schwed has the same pick as the Pulp for top commercial. This yahoo didn’t get a laugh out of it, though.

So what about the big headlines?

Well, the Post went with “Unbridled Joy.” We get it, real colts sometimes have bridals and … okay, it’s pretty lame. (Pulp-supplied retort to itself: “Sort of like the headline on this post.”)

The Miami Herald chose “Colts Reign.” Stronger, but kind of the same thing as the Post, not inspired and playing on a stretched pun (reign-rain-reins).

For art, both of those newspapers opted to run large shots of a triumphant Tony Dungy, the Indy coach. It worked — the photographs lit up the page, literally, and were strong news-wise.

Now for the Sentinel, which, once again, fell on its face on a big morning. The headline: “Soggy But Super.” God no. How horrible. I can hear the debate in the newsroom now.

Editor 1: “‘Super But Soggy’? That sounds sort of stupid to me.”
Editor 2: “Yes, but … it’s alliterative!”
Editor 1: “Alliterative? Brilliant!”

Visually, it was dreary mess, too, with a

busy, hazy, completely indistinct shot of the crowd. Of course it was hazy and indistinct — it was taken in the rain in the relatively shadowy stands. It’s not a bad photograph, just a bad decision for the front page.

So who wins? Gotta go Herald, Post, then Sentinel with a distant, hazy, and indistinct third-place finish.

(The Chicago Tribune, by the way, had a good one this morning: “Tropical depression.” There were actually a lot of serviceable Illinois-based headlines: “Unbearable,” “Drowned Out,” “Super Bust.” The Indianapolis Star, though, shows us that the Sentinel isn’t alone in the realm of the inept. Looks like Ned Flanders wrote this this headline ).