I feel the feeling I forgot

Tonight's the big night: Phish is back! Okay, they actually returned from their breakup in March with 3 shows in Hampton, but tonight is the start of their summer tour, at Fenway no less, and I shall be in attendance. Weather looks great, hopefully the last 2 nights of Dave Matthews Band being at the old ballpark didn't leave it in too bad of shape, and I can't wait. As Red said in The Shawshank Redemption, "I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head." But I do have one thought: Who are the editors and researchers at USA Today?

Why do I ask that? Because of what I saw in the May 15th edition of the "newspaper". I was flipping through the Life section, looking for the crossword puzzle (it's in the money section now -- who knew?) and they had a big listing of the "major summer music tours". There was a photo of Trey Anasatasio, lead guitarist and singer of Phish, so of course it grabbed my attention. Here's a scan of page.


In case you can't read the caption, it says: Extended jam sessions: Trey Anastasio, along with Jeff Holdsworth, Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman, added more dates to the Phish tour.

Only one problem with this caption, though it's kind of a major problem: Jeff Holdsworth left Phish in 1986! About a year before that Page McConnell joined the band as keyboardist, and he's been with the band ever since -- for more than 20 years. This is kind of like listing Pete Best as the Beatles drummer in 1969 and leaving out Ringo.

So how did this happen? I have my suspicision. So the editor of the story put together all the copy for the bands, and said, "I want to highlight Phish." So he tells the photo editor, "Get me a photo of the band". The photo editor finds a few options, and they decide on the one of Trey above. They then send this to design to get it laid out, but before they do, they need a caption. Some editor or researcher who has never heard of Phish then goes to Wikipedia and finds the Phish entry. And at the very beginning of the band's "History" entry, it says:

Phish was formed at The University of Vermont in 1983 by guitarists Trey Anastasio and Jeff Holdsworth, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman.

Hmmmm...kind of interesting that they listed the band in the same exact order as they do in the Wikipedia page. Also interesting that in the "History" section they don't mention the comings and goings of bandmates -- you need to page down to the bottom to see that. So obviously the researcher saw the first paragraph, typed up the band members, and sent it on to layout. After the page was laid out an editor would have looked it over, though most of the time that's simply for mispellings or grammatical errors. The entire page then goes to print, and millions of Phish fans everywhere almost choke on their chai tea the morning of May 15 when they open the page, see the photo of Trey, and notice that Jeff Holdsworth is back with the band. Is it any wonder that newspapers are going extinct? (Okay, no Phish fans are reading USA Today, but it makes for good copy. And this is a blog, so no need for a researcher or editor.)