The News Tribune is a good newspaper. Without its powerful voice in the South Sound, this community wouldn’t be anything close to what it is. 
With that said, long hours and late deadlines make editors vulnerable to following habits that sometimes come back to bite.
Case in point: Page A10 in today’s News Tribune.
In the lower right corner of the back page, which provides the continuation of a full treatment of the Powell family tragedy, sits today’s Dilbert cartoon.
I’m sure nobody batted an eye as the page went through the editorial process as the focus was placed entirely on the editorial content of the big story.
But to the “fresh eyes” of a reader this morning, it just didn’t fit.
We see these awkward juxtapositions of content ALL the time in newspapers, TV and on the web. They are very hard to catch, and in the case of ad adjacency on web-based video, very hard to automate against.
Contextual algorithms may provide some solution in fully automated publishing environments, but the human mind is still the best defense – until it fails – as it did today on page A10 IMHO.
