Not sure what compelled Inquirer Sixers beat writer Keith Pompey to hedge his efforts and write that the Sixers beat the Bucks last night – at no point did they hold anything that even resembled a commanding lead – but this illustrates (just a tiny example, for sure) a mindset of a time gone by. People writing on deadline do things like this. They pre-write grafs and fit their piece together at the end, formulaically, like an Ikea sofa. That’s why so many newspaper stories are mundane. There’s no tone or flow. Just the facts, please.

Unfortunately for Keith, who is not particularly young or adept at writing for an online audience, and therefore was not one of the many staffers told of their layoff yesterday*, his facts were wrong and an editor didn’t catch his mistake (it has been fixed online). So we congratulate the Sixers on their first win.**

UPDATE: Three mistakes for Pompey today. From his blog post:

Best performance: It would be insane to not give this award to Khris Middleton.  The Bucks shooting guard scored seven of his team-high 21 points. None were bigger than his final five points to clinch the game. Middleton hit a three-pointer to give the Bucks a 89-85 cushion with 48.4 seconds left. Then after Jahlil Okafor closed the gap to two points, Middleton drained a pair of foul shots with 1.4 seconds left to clinch the game.

…

Best performance by a Sixer: T.J. McConnell gets this one on a night where he didn’t come close to being the team’s leader scorer.

Scored seven of his team-high 21 points. YOU DON’T SAY!

Good thing they laid off all those copy editors…

*Inexplicably, they kept both Sixers beat writers – Bob Cooney and Pompey – but laid off both Phillies beat writers, whose stories undoubtedly generate more interest. Seniority, brah!

**They didn’t win.

H/T to reader Michael