Old timey skilz: The Subway Fold

Those of you who have never ridden the subway in New York City probably have never heard of The Subway Fold.

Don’t feel bad. It’s so obscure that there’s no Wikipedia entry! Gasp! Horrors!

I hadn’t heard of the term either, but my good friend Mr. O introduced me to it back in the late ‘90s. What the fold is, simply, a little newsprint Origami to resize your newspaper so you can read it on the subway and not spill off into your seat mates’s space.

In these examples, we see the proper way to read a paper (using The Subway Fold) and the incorrect way (like you’re sitting on the throne in your home).

I’ll leave it up to my legions of readers to decide which way is best, or at the least, the more polite way.

The New York Times thoughtfully provided instructions, but it’s no longer in their free area, so you can find it here

Is this a handy skill, or a parlor trick of the last century?

NYT-subway-fold.pdf

It’s never too late for a correction

via epaper.abqjournal.com

The Albuquerque Journal reports that The Associated Press has corrected a cutline to a photo that it moved in 1942.

The original cutline incorrectly said the photo was of the Bataan Death March, but after local survivors of the infamous March questioned the accuracy of a caption The AP investigated it for six months and it will change the caption.

One of the survivors, John E. Love of Albuquerque, said the photo is of a burial detail at Camp O’Donnell, the makeshift POW camp where the march ended.

Running a correction is always embarrassing because it usually means someone screwed up, either by not doing the research or through laziness or carelessness. In this case, given the timeframe that the photo originally ran, one can’t fault The AP for not getting the facts right.

However, kudos to The AP for the nearly 70 year-old-correction.

Zippy the Pinhead and 21 others get the Denver boot

via blogs.westword.com

First off, let’s get this out of the way. I hate the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip.

Actually, hate is not strong enough of a word. Maybe it’s because Zippy is a clown without makeup. Maybe it’s just that he’s a clown (bad enough). Maybe it’s because I just don’t the humor. But, I’m sorry to hear about the Denver Post axing Zippy and 21 other strips to cut space, save on newsprint and for ads.

I love reading the daily strips — one of the first things that I always turn to.. gets me off to a good start before plunging into the hard news of the day. And don’t get me started going on the Sunday funnies!

To bad Mayor La Guardia isn’t around to read the axed funnies to us.

Anyway, it’s a shame to see papers cutting down on one if not THE most popular part of the daily rag. I’m sure that there Denverites out there that will cancel their subscriptions because their fav strip is gone — or drive them more to the web to find it.

What a shame. Charge ’em more give ’em less. That seems to be a trend and one that speeds the downhill decline.

Kudos for Westword (an alt weekly) for reporting on this. Westword loves to take jabs at the Post, and this time it’s deserved.

… and I’m high-fiving myself for using Denver Boot in a totally non-illegally-parked-car reference.

Paperboy of the Day: The “Geez, Beav — Quit giving me the Business” edition

via digital.lib.ecu.edu

All the way back from 1966, this youngster is throwing The Daily Reflector in Greenville, North Carolina.

My good friend and former Reflector Copy Chief Greg Laudick tipped me off to this story about how the paper’s former owners donated some 7,500 photos and the copyright to East Carolina University’s Joyner Library.

End result is that all of the images are online and available for free non-commercial use.

Thanks to the Whichard family for the donation and the Joyner librarians for all of their digitizing hard work!

Read more about the donation here, visit the archive here and read about how the collection was digitized here.