Exhibit no. 371 in a series, from the Arizona Republic:

5 pallets of water are donated
SCOTTSDALE – The Greater Southwest Chapter of the Club Managers Association of America has donated five pallets of water to Arizona Helping Hands Inc.

Terra Waldron – vice president and general manager of Desert Highlands, a private golf and residential community in Scottsdale – and her staff joined forces to collect two pallets of water for Helping Hands.

This was the lead item in the paper’s Scottsdale news column this a.m. It continued for five more paragraphs.

It’s bad enough that newspapers reprint press releases and sell them as news; do they have to reprint boring press releases? How did the writer stay awake while typing out those sentences? Who at the Republic thinks that people want to read stuff like that instead of actual news? Why, after the paper has gone through one recent round of layoffs, does the staff that remains have to spend its time doing things like this?

And finally, I used AZCentral.com’s search engine to try to find this story after seeing it in the paper. No matter how I searched for it, it didn’t come up.

Here’s the search for “Waldron,” for example.

I went to Google News and … it came right up, giving me the story I linked to above.

In other words, the paper’s web site doesn’t even know what’s on the paper’s web site.