This ad at at a journalism job site shows how similar names of cities are easily confused. Here's the difference:

• Charleston, S.C., is a coastal city known for its lovely architecture and Southern charm. The first shots of the Civil War were fired there.
  

• Charlotte, N.C., is a landlocked city known as a center of banking and finance. It's where the Carolina Panthers play their home football games.

This headline from The Drudge Report is a classic example of twisting numbers to create a false impression. The reader is led to believe that "An Inconvenient Truth" is melting down at the box office, but a click on the link and a close look at the numbers show otherwise:

• It's true that box office was down for "An Inconvenient Truth" on Sunday, which seems to be the point of the Drudge headline. But so were the numbers for nearly every other movie. (Maybe this has something to do with Father's Day.)

• It's true that "An Inconvenient Truth" came in 12th on the list, pulling in $1.75 million for the weekend. In raw totals, it's dwarfed by "Cars" and "Nacho Libre." But look at the per-screen average, which is a better barometer of whether people are filling theaters for a movie. Using that, "Truth" beat "A Prairie Home Companion," "The Break-Up," the "Garfield" sequel and the latest X-Men movie, among others.
  

"An Inconvenient Truth" even gave "The Lake House" a run for its money. If Al Gore's glorified PowerPoint presentation can compete with a Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves romance at the box office, he's doing pretty well.

"Is there a mug with that?" is a frequently asked question in newsrooms. Page designers are familiar with creating layouts with faces of newsmakers, and copy editors are accustomed to writing captions (also known as cutlines) for them. But not all readers like to see these faces in their daily paper.

Some readers in the Triangle are upset with The News & Observer for publishing a photo of a Duke lacrosse player in a recent story. Fred Krom is not one of the players charged in that well-publicized rape investigation, but the DA in the case wants information from him and other people. Krom's attorneys call the request a "fishing expedition."

The objection from readers, many of whom already are angry at the paper for its coverage of the lacrosse team, say that running Krom's photo implies guilt. To them, it's another example of bias. Other N&O readers raised similar concerns during the 2004 campaign, when supporters of John Kerry objected to a frequently used file photo that they said made their candidate's face look like a withered tree trunk.

In both cases, the readers were reading more into the mugs than was intended, but their complaints do raise questions about how and why newspaper editors (as well as editors in other media) frequently run small images of people's faces with stories.

The faces of news

In this case, the N&O ran what appears to be a handout photo of Krom, probably from the media guide published by Duke's athletics department. Such "mug shots" appear frequently in American newspapers; the idea is to let readers see what people in the news look like. It's a standard and accepted practice in the profession. In this case, to run such a photo is not to pass judgment on Krom or on the legal issues discussed in the accompanying story.

It gets trickier when editors have the choice to run a true "mug shot" — the booking photograph made when a person is arrested or charged. Such images tend to be unflattering, even freaky, as the collection of mugs on The Smoking Gun illustrates. They serve the same function as the "perp walk" on TV news: They appeal to our uneasy fascination with the criminal. And in some cases, we even take some joy in the fact that the suspect has met justice. Knowing this, people such as Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh have literally put the best face possible on their recent mug shots by smiling as if they were posing for a family snapshot. Conversely, Time magazine made O.J. Simpson's mug shot even more ominous by darkening the frame around his face for an infamous 1994 cover image.

The Redick case

Schadenfreude was probably in play in another legal matter involving a Duke athlete, J.J. Redick. The former Blue Devil is one of those players who stirred strong emotions among basketball fans. Duke fans love him; fans of most other teams hate him. There is no middle ground.

The arrest of Redick on DWI charges also created the need for an editorial decision: publish the "official" photo of Redick or the police "mug shot." The grainy photo shows a bleary-eyed Redick looking out of sorts.

The TV station that broke the story used the booking photo on its Web site, as did ESPN. The N&O used the Duke-issued "glamour shot" photo on its site, and then switched to the booking photo later in the day. It also used the booking photo in the newspaper. Ted Vaden, the newspaper's public editor, said he had received no complaints about the N&O's use of the unflattering image of Redick.

Conclusion

Editors should take care in the selection of what mugs are used and how they are used. What's important is that the image be representative of the person: Let's not pick a photo that captures a person in an awkward moment or that makes it difficult to discern to recongize the subject. As any editor who has looked through a collection of photos from a news conference would attest, still photography makes it easy to make anyone look foolish. As with everything journalists do, it helps to anticipate the reaction from readers.

In the crime stories, use of booking photos is often justified. In Redick's case, the image contributes to the storytelling. The photo, which portrays his condition at the time of his arrest, is news in and of itself. But it's important for editors not to revel in such photos or to pander to their readers by playing them too large or prominently.

This headline in the North Raleigh News makes a common error: throwing a second "i" into what should be "minuscule." The Web version of the story corrects the problem.

The word, meaning "tiny" or "very small," comes from French and Latin. It is tempting to write "mini" as the first four letters because of that definition. According to this site, some dictionaries are open to the "mini" spelling, and the dictionary on my computer recognizes the "mini" version as a non-standard spelling.

The AP Stylebook, however, prefers the traditional spelling. So do I.

The public editor at the Orlando Sentinel has an interesting column on "homicides" and "murders," and how a style rule tripped up the paper, requiring a correction.

In this letter to the editor, a library worker bemoans the misspelling of "pedestrians" on a sign. Her concern: What message does this send to freshmen on campus for orientation?

The letter is among the "most popular articles" on The Daily Tar Heel site.

Here's an especially unfortunate error: a credit line that misspells the name of the paper. It makes me feel sorry for the writer, who probably had nothing to do with it.

Granted, this example comes from an "advertorial" section, but those need editing like anything else. A quick spell-check would have flagged this mistake.

Editors spend a great deal of thought trying to figure out what their readers want. For newspapers, it's often hard to know what stories were read and which were ignored.

The "most popular" and "most e-mailed" lists on Web sites give some indication of what readers in that medium want. Earlier this year, the New York Times added a "most blogged" list of stories. Now the BBC is taking that idea to the next level. This part of the BBC site shows the most popular stories through the filters of time and geography.

Welcome to The Desk, a blog for anyone interested in editing.

To get us started, copy editor Pam Nelson discusses this confusing headline in today's News & Observer. I reacted to the headline the same way Pam did: I read "lead" as a verb, not a noun. "Fear" has a similar ambiguity.