Brick, the Orphan Child

If George Bush doesn't care about black people, and Kanye West doesn't care about little girl country singers, then Media General doesn't care about its bastard child tab, Brick. Which I notice is no longer Reloaded. It's just Brick, as in sinking like a...

The inside front cover is a house ad. The back cover is a house ad. The inside back cover is a puzzle page. Underneath the staff box and (one) letter is a house ad. All prime advertising spots are going vacant. The staff box lists an executive manager, but no one claiming to be anything even remotely close to an editor. The editing shows it. Chris Bopst's column is fraught with awkward phrasing and repeated words in the same sentence. (It's called a thesaurus.)

In a comical mis-edit of the Wear It page this week, each of the four people pictured are asked how they are similar to their dog. Their dogs all have different names, but since the first text box asked "How is Henry (the dog) similar to you?," every text box after that asks all the other people not how they are similar to their own dog, but "How is Henry similar to you?"

Most telling, this week the Times-Dispatch changed the size of their paper for a sleeker, narrower look. But this means the tabloids are also printing on these narrower sheets, giving them an almost perfectly square (11x11.5) look. (Style, in comparison, is 11x12). No one thought how that would impact the classifieds, which are either bunched at the bottom of the page or cut off at the top, or that the cover template would need to be redesigned.

Media General needs to take care of all the products it prints and not put something out on the streets that is embarassingly designed, poorly written and edited, appears to have not an iota of preplanning involved, and broadcasts the lack of advertising so blatantly. (You can't even find some non-profits to give free ads to rather than bulk up with house ads in all the key spots?)

Not to mention, the Brick website has been all but abandoned.

Don't you care about your image, MG? Even a little bit?