My local newspaper, like most, is a ghost of its former self. It has a handful of reporters and columnists who write interesting stuff, but much of its content is re-sourced from other news organizations. I believe in supporting my local newspaper, but I often read the news online before it appears in the local edition.
Yesterday, I read online about UPS laying off 12,000 employees. At first, I thought that this was a big layoff, and I am sure that those 12,000 souls would agree that it was important, but further reading revealed that UPS has nearly 500,000 employees, so it represented around 2.4% of their workforce. It wasn’t as big as it seemed on the surface. The volume of packages that the company delivered last year was down 9%.
In the San Jose Mercury News the next day, I was surprised by the headline of the article:
UPS to cut 12,000 jobs as wages rise
– San jose Mercury news reprint of new york times article, 1/31/2024
This headline seemed biased to me, pretty much attributing the layoff to rising wages. It made me wonder whether reprinted articles like this kept the same headline that they had in the news source. So I went to the New York Times online edition, and I found the article. It had the following headline:
UPS to Cut 12,000 Jobs as Wages Rise and Package Volumes Fall
– New york times, by J. Edward Moreno, 1/30/2024
Well now. This headline seems much more even-handed to me. I think that it does a good job of introducing the different factors at play in this case. I can’t say that I love the headline caps style that the Times uses, but good job on the things that really matter.
I examined the article and the reprinted article more closely, and found one more disconcerting difference. The Merc cut the last four paragraphs of the Times article, which gave additional background to put these cuts in the context of the larger economy. The overall effect of the omission is a more negative picture of what is going on in the business world.
I am not surprised that re-printing newspapers reserve the right to trim the source articles to fit, but I plan to look at this more carefully in the future to figure out what I am losing in the translation.
