Making fun of the Arizona Daily Star’s website isn’t that difficult, honestly. It’s kinda terrible in a number of different ways, from content to usability — and I’m not saying that as a competitor, but as someone who actually uses the Internet for things. It’s just bad.
But c’mon, azstarnet.com. This is what you’re running on your site right now?:
- azstarnet.com
- ‘Tuned in,’ they say. Right.
That, dear reader, is a bylined story highlighting a special being run by a national chain of sandwich shops that isn’t even based in this town:
Subway has resurrected its popular early bird BOGO offer.
Throughout the month of April you can get a free 6-inch sandwich with the purchase of a 6-inch sandwich. But the offer is good only until 9 a.m. daily.
Subway has 39,182 restaurants in 102 countries and a big handful of them in the Tucson area including at 5480 E. Speedway, 2955 W. Valencia Road, 455 E. Wetmore Road, 1503 W. Saint Marys Road and 10325 N. LaCanada Drive in Oro Valley.
Apparently, it isn’t even an ad. It’s just…there. As a thing. We’ll assume that they got a press release from Subway and had to write SOMETHING for the Caliente section — slow news day. I get it. We’ll fill our pages with goofy content too sometimes (and hell, it’s not even like we’re [completely] against the idea of sponsored content, though if we did so we’d at least ensure we weren’t whoring ourselves in the process — and we wouldn’t pretend it wasn’t an ad, either).
But they’re running this as the top story in their food section, bumping a local story to site purgatory:
- azstarnet.com
- Really? Really?
See that note about Brewd Coffee Lounge? As mentioned in Noshing Around last week, Brewd closed up shop after a rough year downtown. The Star’s story notes their forthcoming move to the east side, which might help them in the long run, as they won’t have to compete with construction or two other high-quality coffee joints (Sparkroot and Exo Roast Co.) less than a mile away.
That is actually interesting — far more so than a rewritten press release about cheap-ass sandwiches, anyway.
Get it together, Daily Star — we all know that you’re likely to move to a paywall, joining most of your other Lee Enterprises brethren, sooner rather than later. There’s no way that you’re going to convince people to buy into your website with content like that…or this baseball quiz, for that matter, which was ripped straight from the website of stltoday.com, complete with links to St. Louis Cardinals features at the end, no less.
This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2013.
This story makes me want to cry. Seriously. I suspect the writers over there are just as disgusted to write this tripe as we are to read it. No one wants to see anyone lose their job, but the sooner that hollow shell of a former great information source goes bankrupt, the sooner the next incarnation of our local newspaper of record will be able to manifest for eager readers.
As a regular Weekly reader, and only occasional Star reader, I find this particular bashing to be unnecessary. No one wants a newspaper to become a de-facto ad flyer, but several things merit this printing above a story of Brewd moving to the east side. First of all Subway no doubt has many more customers in Tucson than Brewd, probably by a factor of 20 or more. Second, Subway offers inexpensive calories, and unlike the vast majority of inexpensive fast food providers, has many more options for eating healthier calories. And that’s something that is of very real significance, as the ubiquitous availability of hazardous inexpensive easy calories is something that affects our culture and our pocketbooks in more ways than most ever consider. Can you and should you eat even healthier and local? Absolutely, especially if you can afford to with your paycheck and your time. What we eat is unquestionably one of the most important decisions we make every day. But let’s accept reality for what a majority of people are going to continue to do. I’m personally glad the Star ran a brief news story about something that could ultimately positively affect Tucson.
It’s just a damn shame they had to go and post it with a photo of a meatball sandwich.
I see this all the freaking time on azstarnet and I try to call them out on it as often as possible. The ones for McDonalds are particularly painful. If I were an editor at the daily star, I might try telling subway to pay for an ad instead of printing a press release. I hope to god they’re at least getting paid something for printing this tripe as news…
Whomever thinks Subway has nutritional food is obese because of it.
I’d rather tether my testicles around a telephone pole than eat a subway sandwich, whether it was free or not.
To BURNIE MAK:
I’d pay money to see that. That’s definitely something that people do not witness everyday.
sounds painful, but I might end up liking it, who knows.
What journalistic goal does your profane headline accomplish that would not be possible without the profanity?
It exemplified the frantic mindset that I imagine the folks at the Star had to have been in to shuffle over the perfectly good story about Brewd in favor of a deal at Subway.
Also, it made me laugh.
I, personally, think the profanity was absolutely necessary to display the ridiculousness of having this as a cover story for anything other than ‘Crappy Chain Subs Digest’
It makes it even better that their tagline is “tuned in”