“Newspapers on the cheap” has reached a new low. Without acknowledging that it had done so, today’s News-Register ran the same editorial it did on September 22, 2019.* (In fairness to Ogden, there were two differences; today’s editorial twice updated the age of the newspaper.)

Our local Ogden newspapers do something that I’ve never seen any other paper do – they run self-congratulatory editorials on the anniversary of the paper’s founding. That said, today’s editorial once again provides readers with another example of Ogden’s total disdain for its readers – the only difference between today’s editorial and the one published two years ago today is a change of date.

Today’s editorial begins:

Today, we at the News-Register observe a birthday – our 131st.

On September 22, 2019, the editorial began:

Today, we at the News-Register observe a birthday – our 129th.

The rest of the editorials match-up word-for-word except for the next-to-the-last sentence in which the number of years is again changed.

Yes, it’s an editorial about how the Wheeling News-Register cares about its readers. However, instead of updating with a 2021 perspective that, at the least, mentions the pandemic, it simply repeats the same clichés that it used in the Trump era.

More laziness – another recycled Ohio editorial

The other News-Register editorial, “A Changing Job Market,” is a couple-of-weeks-old editorial from some Ogden Ohio newspaper. (It has nothing to do with West Virginia and its dated references suggest its age. As I’ve noted previously, the local’s love to use old editorials from one of Ogden’s thirteen Ohio newspapers – most of which do not publish their editorials online.)

I could not find this one online but I did find that the editorial had a number of similarities to a September 6 news report from WBNS in Columbus about a Policy Ohio jobs study released that same day. Coincidentally, they both begin by noting area “Job Hiring” signs. Additionally, they both draw the same conclusions from that Policy Ohio jobs report and they both use the same quotes from Policy Ohio’s Michael Shields.

Interesting.

*By the way, what tipped me off was when I read this sentence in the editorial:

We owe no allegiance to any special interest or powerful person.

Yes, for obvious reasons, I’ve quoted that sentence a number of times in the past two years and alarms went off as I read it.