Back in February, readers of the Arizona Republic’s feature section were given a wire-service story about dogs on Facebook:

“Busy social network for the furry set.”

Then there was the story about … dogs on Twitter:

“Dogs can tweet, too (sort of).”

Then came a hard-hitting story about pet boarding:

“Posh pads for pampered pooches.”

Then a story about a “therapy dog” who, sniff sniff, died:

“Gabriel gets his wings.”

Most of these stories were wire copy, which means that instead of figuring out a way to get vibrant and essential local news into the section with folks on staff, the editor is just picking shmaltzy fluff out of the free copy the paper has available to it from the various news services it subscribes to.

You might think, after all that, that the Living section had scraped the bottom of the barrel when it came to bland and inoffensive dog news …

… and you’d be right.

Today the section has a front-page story on … Posh pads for pampered pooches!

It’s the second wire service story the section has run on this topic in the past two months.

The hedline and the story are different, but the idea is the same.

This one is called “It’s a dog’s life: Ritzy pet resorts replace kennels of yesterday.”

It’s about an upscale “pet resort.”

In Charlotte, North Carolina.

Why a paper in a industry fighting for its life would just give up in this way is a puzzlement.

… until we discovered who is currently editing the section:


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