Poor Richard's Scorecard

And Coming Later This Week, Sports Coverage of Just the Second Half of the Villanova-Robert Morris Game

WHEN I was on my college paper, I was assigned to review a school production of The Odd Couple, but because it opened after our deadline, I watched a dress rehearsal to write the review. Yesterday's Inquirer came perilously close to that shoddy level of professionalism.

Well, at Least Zonker Is a Loser

Here's how the Inquirer has been announcing today's arrival of a new comic strip whose title character, an unemployed recent college graduate, moves back in with his parents and sister to save money:

For the Inquirer and Daily News, a Case of Good News, Bad News

FOR A year and change now, Philadelphia Media Holdings, the company that owns the Inquirer, the Daily News, and philly.com, has been in bankruptcy. Amidst coverage of the dispute between PMH and its creditors, the papers took time last week to file stories assessing the state of the company as it makes it way through the costly, quarrelsome process.

This passage caught my eye:

Yeah, Let's Not Confuse Dr. Dobson With a Man of God

Time for another fun Inquirer correction:

A story Friday about a Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad incorrectly used the title "the Rev." to identify group founder James Dobson. Dobson is not an ordained minister.

Now, it's great to see the editors striving for accuracy, but if they were serious, they would have added something like: "But he is a reactionary, homophobic boogerhead." And journalists wonder why people don't trust them anymore. | PRS

The Question, Quite Frankly, Is: Did Stephen A. Trade In His BlackBerry for an iPhone or Droid?

Yes, Philadelphia, your long journalistic nightmare is over. The columnist so bracing, so insightful, so Philly that he can file a first-person-laden, exclamation-point-soaked piece with just his thumbs is back! And just how did Stephen A. Smith, fresh off a two-year break from print work, splash back into the pages of the Inquirer? Why, with a brilliant, probing dissection of the 76ers: "Barely anyone will care once this season ends." I don't know about you, but I sure found it worth the wait. | PRS

Does Brian Tierney Really Think the Idle Rich Will Keep His Papers Solvent?

In a wildly self-serving Facebook post, Gothamist publisher and cofounder Jake Dobkin talked of what he hopes to address at a panel discussion for New York Times executives tomorrow on local NYC news. Dobkin is unnecessarily snarky in defending Gothamist's business model--which can be summarized as "rip off the mainstream media"--but this point got me to thinking:

The Philadelphia Inquirer or the National Enquirer?

What may be the correction of the year appears at the bottom of the front page of today's Inquirer:

The Inquirer yesterday erred in publishing a photograph that accompanied a story on Judge Paul W. Tressler of Montgomery County Court. The photograph was not of the judge, shown at left, but of Howard Nevison, a sex offender sentenced by Tressler in 2006. The Inquirer regrets the error and apologizes.

Most corrections are buried within the interior regions of the paper, all the better to avoid owning up to the error, but when you mix up a judge with a sex offender, I suppose a more prominent acknowledgment is in order. Indeed, the paper not only regrets this particular gaffe, it apologizes for it. The Inky should be so contrite about its other monumental errors, and here I'm thinking of its foisting Stephen A. Smith on us for so many years.| PRS

Phodder: Someone Please Tell Vince Fumo That His Diet Is Now Bread and Water, Not Whine and Cheese

• As if Vince Fumo's lawyers weren't sufficiently tone-deaf, now they're bitching about his country-club prison being too far away for his family to visit. Dude, it's, like, jail. It's supposed to be hard.
• Make you a deal, Philadelphia Media Holdings: I'll support your "Keep It Local" campaign for the Inquirer, the Daily News, and philly.com if you give me more local reporting instead of the reams and reams of wire copy I now have to wade through.
• The recent 40th anniversary of Woodstock elicited several breathless, overhyped stories in the Sunday Inquirer recently. For the 40th anniversary of the Internet, readers got merely a wire-service analysis buried in the Tuesday business section. And papers wonder why young people aren't reading.
• Curt Schilling's musings about a political run surely must originate in his belief that it isn't fair for Jim Bunning to be the only loudmouth psycho Republican ex-Phillies pitcher in the Senate.
• I'm glad I'm still young enough to see the cultural value of the Fringe Festival to the city. And I'm glad I'm now old enough not to have to convince myself that I have to go. | PRS

Phodder: For a Guy Who Doesn't Wield a Paint Brush, Timothy Rub Is Earning a Lot of Notice from the Art Press

Happy birthday, America! ... Wow, did the Inquirer spend an awful lot of column-inches on the incoming director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ... The Phillies had no compunction about punting Brett Myers to Lehigh Valley last season to straighten out his head and let him play through his fog without hurting the club; at what point do they start thinking about the same tactic for Jimmy Rollins? ... Discussions about shunting Interstate 95 away from the Delaware River waterfront in Center City to open up that vastly underused area for much-needed development are long overdue. Yet I worry about the algebra: Massive public-works project + Philadelphia = epic corruption. It would make Boston's Big Dig look like a Boy Scout meeting. ... The city's postponement of parking rate hikes is all well and good, but doing something about the crippling cost of doing business would have greater long-term impact. ... The saturation coverage of the double murder at the Piazza at Schmidt's again raises the question of why we don't pay such attention to all victims--including, say, the ones who aren't noted figures on the local club scene. ... Brian Boucher arrives, Mike Knuble departs; I don't like that math. | PRS

Phodder, a collection of brief thoughts regarding some of the week's happenings in and around Philadelphia, appears Saturdays in Poor Richard's Scorecard.

Here's One Reason for the Inquirer to Be Optimistic

At the breakfast table, she fires questions at me: Did the Phillies win? Did the Mets win? How big is our lead? Who do we play next? When? What time? Who's pitching? Check the paper, I tell her. And so she walks over to the small desk where we put each morning's issue of the Inquirer, pulls out the sports section, and begins spreading it apart next to her bowl of oatmeal. Watching my 7-year-old delve in with such enthusiasm warms this writer's heart, for it is something I did at her age--and something I still do today. She tells me what she sees: who beat whom by inflated scores, where the Phils sit in the standings, how terrific the Dodgers are doing and how awful the Nationals are. I've begun explaining box scores to her. One of these days she'll discover other sections, as I did, and perhaps then her perusal of headlines and bylines and stories and sidebars will evolve from mere information gathering to an anticipated, leisurely, daily ritual. One wonders, of course, what shape the paper will be in if and when that shift happens, but for now I will continue to stoke her interest and pray that print journalism somehow figures it out before it's too late. | PRS