Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worser!
Today it publishes a feature—complete with massive photo—on the cover of its business section about …
… Starbucks using a new cup size.
A. New. Cup. Size.
That’s what warrants a cover feature at the Arizona Republic.
As usual, the story itself is correspondingly insipid. Here’s the lede:
Phoenix-area coffee junkies who have grown immune to Starbucks’ maximum 24-ounce jolt now can boost their caffeine intake by 30 percent without loading up on extra shots.
The Seattle-based coffeehouse chain is test-marketing a new 31-ounce cup for iced coffees and teas in Phoenix and Tampa to determine whether customers are ready to supersize their caffeine.
For what is essentially ad copy for a corporation, it’s mighty fine prose. A graf later, looking for a little color to brighten up the story, reporter Max Jarman intrepidly finds a customer drinking from one of the new cups.
Turns out he was drinking decaffeinated ice tea.
Jarman doesn’t say what the drinks will cost, nor does he mention the nutritional issues. Extrapolating from info on Starbucks’ own nutrition pages, you can see that a 31-ounce Frappuccino will contain about 600 calories, and more than 100 grams of carbs.
As for the illustration, it’s a big picture of a coffee cup with a big ol’ Starbucks logo on the side. Some drawings to the right of the photo are a great example of the expository journalism a newspaper can provide its audience with, given some planning and just a tiny bit of creativity.
I think anyone looking at the result will immediately apprehend that a 31-ounce cup is bigger than a 24-ounce cup.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday over in the Living section, the paper has continued its fascination with psychics.
The hedline of the story is this:
Psychics see their popularity rising
Medium’s popularity a sign of public’s growing fascination with the other side
I suppose its relevant to mention that the story is about no such thing. It quotes one alleged psychic saying she was busy, but she never says she has more business than normal, and no one else does, either. (Indeed, she’s the only purported psychic quoted.)
The story does more than you’d expect by quoting a psychic debunker, but then, in an almost parodic descent into a rabit hole of journalistic over-objectivity, finds someone to quarrel with the debunker!
But Richard Mann, a professor emeritus of psychology and religion at the University of Michigan, says people have always expressed a connection with the dead….
Worst of all, the story is a wire piece from Detroit. It’s just amazing to think that an editor at the paper decided that of all the wire stories available that day, the crappy one about the psychics was the one to run.
Previously in PHXated: