Dear Editor:
"Jefferson City doesn't register on new list of beautiful towns," read the front page headline for April 1. I thought I was reading an April fools' joke or something until I realized the "joke" was put upon Jefferson City through the act of omission, at the time of Jefferson City's win in the "Most beautiful small town" category, as Rand McNally's 2013 Best of the Road competition.
While I am most thankful not to have the responsibility to ascertain what is newsworthy, I do have to say that the City of Jefferson and the readers of the News Tribune were shortchanged when it came to the one-photo article in 2013.
One picture may be worth 1,000 words, but a 529-word article accompanied by one photo seems remiss.
Such brevity might explain why Jefferson City received only 12 votes in Rural Missouri's beautiful towns contest, out of the "thousands and thousands" of readers reported by Rural Missouri Editor Jim McCarty.
George Bernard Shaw nailed it when he said, "Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time." In my opinion, today's article delivered strike two.