ugliest_dog


The Arizona Republic, which writes about local dogs more than humans, has a story today about a dog who died in the heat.

We’re sorry about the dog, but we already knew that it was hot out.

The story was in our zoned section, but we’re betting Scruffy McPoochie, the paper’s canny, canine Living section editor, will grab the thing and reuse it in his section sometime next week.

McPoochie, pictured above, is just one of the folks from whatever species who’ve help make the Arizona Republic the nation’s leading purveyor of dog journalism.

Just a couple of weeks ago, McPoochie ran a story about dog insurance.

It was a wire story, and mostly about people in Chicago, but McPoochie knew that dog journalism isn’t about states. It’s a state of mind.

It was such a great subject that a jealous business-section editor, in an act of journalistic oneupdogship, reassigned it to a Republic staffer, and the paper ran another story on the same lame subject.

The result, as we saw, wasn’t as good as the Chicago one, but whatever.

The paper doesn’t mind doubling down on dog journalism.

McPoochie ran a story about swanky dog hotels a while back …

… and a few weeks later, ran another story about the same damn thing.

Then there was the story about dogs on Twitter.

Which was almost as interesting as the story about dogs on Facebook.

And this is in addition to the paper’s day-to-day coverage of the beat: The church that allows dogs … another story about a dog who died … earthshaking changes at a dog park ….

Sure the paper’s circulation is declining ten percent or more a year.

That’s just among humans.

The local dog population may yet turn out to give the paper a whole new …

… leash on life!