Yesterday, in its Your Home section, the paper introduced a new gardening columnist, Cathy Babcock.

Babcock is a former director at the Desert Botanical Garden and seems like a nice addition to the section, and all is well and good.

Except … instead of just letting Babcock write something, the editor decided the section needed to herald the hire with an actual interview of Babcock.

The resulting piece is unbylined, even though its written in a chirpy, personal style:

She understands the heat. She understands our soil. And she understands that many of us want to plant an herb garden like the one we saw in Martha Stewart Living, and she can help us pull it off.

The unbylined story is a Republic tic we’ve discussed here and here.

Anyway, that’s all bad enough. The interview that follows is done Q&A style, with bold-faced questions, followed by what you’d think would be Babcock’s replies in normal type beneath then.

Instead, the answers to the questions are just normal article prose.

It’s weird! It reads like Babcock is talking about herself in the third person.

For example:

Are you a life-long gardener?

Babcock got interested in plants during a trip to California with her sister in the late 1980s. Babcock actually went back to school to study horticulture. She worked in accounting and “didn’t want to work in an office anymore.” She studied urban horticulture at Arizona State University, graduating in 1989, and has worked at the garden since.

And you also get just random dumbness like this:

Do you work in an office now?

Sadly, Babcock acknowledges, much of her day now is in an office…

Have you ever seen a newspaper interview done in that format before?