Talk:The Free Lance–Star
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Okay, I'm new, so I may have gotten this wrong. As I indicated in the edit summary, the original article is verbatim from the source cited. I rewrote the article so that it was NOT in copyright violation; I thought I had saved my edits properly. Now the page is back to the original copy from the Free Lance-Star's website.
What's up? What am I missing?
Moishe Rosenbaum 02:02, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
- Sorry. I must have edited and saved the wrong one when I was comparing them. I still believe its a copyright violation, especially the 3rd paragraph. It needs more than changing a few words. --Evb-wiki 02:15, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
You're right, that I still kept some of the stuff from the site verbatim. My reasoning was that it was the Free Lance-Star's own website being plagiarized... I'm happy to see it deleted, but I thought I'd give it a shot.
Moishe Rosenbaum 02:34, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Suggested changes
{{request edit}}
Hi, folks. First of all, I should declare my conflict of interest: I'm Josiah Rowe IV, son of the publisher of the Free Lance–Star and a member of its Board of Directors. I'm also an active and well-established Wikipedian. Per the recommendations of WP:COI, I should "avoid, or exercise great caution" when editing this article, so I'm trying not to edit it at all. However, I have a few suggestions which the good people who can edit the article can take or leave.
First of all, the newspaper's name is actually spelled with an en dash, not a hyphen, so the article should be moved to The Free Lance–Star. The Free Lance-Star should, of course, be kept as a redirect (and The Free Lance—Star, with an em dash, should be created as another redirect; for that matter, Free Lance–Star and Free Lance—Star should be created as redirects too). This should be uncontroversial.
Other uncontroversial edits which I could probably make myself, were it not for the temptation to make further edits:
- The publishers' names should probably be written out in full, as they are in the staff box on the newspaper's editorial page. That is, "Josiah P. Rowe III", "Florence C. Barnick" and "Nicholas J. Cadwallender". Incidentally, Flo and Nick are associate publishers, not associate editors — I don't think there's a spot in the infobox for that, but someone else can investigate. Incidentally, the editor is Edward W. Jones, if someone wants to add that.
- "web presense" in the fourth paragraph should be changed to "web presence".
- "2 addresses" in the last paragraph should be written as "two addresses"; similarly, "1 year" should be "one year".
The sentence about Time magazine isn't entirely accurate (even though that's what the paper's own site says — I'll have to speak to someone about that). It's conflating two Time stories, one from 1984 ([1]) which calls the Free Lance–Star and the Anniston Star "two of the best" papers with circulations under 40,000. (The Free Lance–Star's circulation today is well over that figure.) The second story is from a 1986 issue titled "American Best" (see cover here). The issue was as much about the things that America does best as it was about the things that were best in America. (See essay here.) Their article on the Free Lance–Star can be found here, in case anyone wants to provide a full citation. I'll let someone else find the best wording for how the article should discuss the Time plaudits.
Now, the (possibly) controversial suggestion: I think that it's noteworthy that the Free Lance–Star has been owned and operated by members of the same family since 1925. Family-owned newspapers used to be the norm in America, but increasingly they're a vanishing breed. The Free Lance–Star is privately owned, not publicly traded, and that has allowed it to escape some of the investor-driven staff cuts which have affected newspapers owned by major media chains in recent years. I don't know how this should be mentioned in the article, but I think that it's worth mention somewhere. There has been coverage of the newspaper in Editor and Publisher, if people feel like doing the research.
Finally, here are a few (non-FLS) sources which might be useful for editors: this is a short article from Brandweek, and the PDF file linked from here, from a supplier of advertising software, has some details which may be useful.
Thanks! —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 01:44, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
