Opinion

First, the breaking news: The Berkeley Daily Planet has captured a flock of prizes in the statewide Better Newspapers Contest sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. At the awards luncheon on Saturday we learned that we’d won two first prizes, for editorial pages overall and for an editorial cartoon by Justin DeFreitas, second prize for a spot news photo by Jakob Schiller, and honorable mentions (top 10 percent of entries in Northern California, statewide finalists) for local spot news (Matthew Artz), writing (Richard Brenneman) and for another DeFreitas cartoon. Please excuse us if we’re mighty proud of this record, especially since we’ve only been around for two years. -more-

Mr. Tobey, who appears again today to our right, seems not to know that editors, not writers, always write the headlines. Headlines in this and most papers will always be the choice of the editor—we’re happy to clarify that for him. There’s a simple practical reason for this: headlines have to be adjusted to fit into space available. Also, we do try to write headlines to catch readers’ eyes, and “Landmarks Meeting of June 27th” just isn’t a very catchy title. And if Mr. Tobey did predict that a headline writer might combine the epithets “anarchist” and “suicide bomber” into the concept of “terrorist” in a headline, he should have used less, shall we say, “inflammatory” language in the first place. -more-