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Yes, we were a Leno joke
Published 06:00 a.m., September 21, 2009
OK, so we’ll admit it. The Fergus Falls Daily Journal was on the Jay Leno Show Monday night.
We also admit that we didn’t announce the news that The Fergus Falls Daily Journal made the Jay Leno Show because, to be honest, we – meaning our managing editor and myself – have been embarrassed about it.
But after a few days of healing, I have decided to divulge. On Monday, Sept. 14, 2009, The Journal was featured on Leno at the end of the show (about the 41 minute mark, for those who want to look it up on Hulu.com).
Leno’s “headlines” typically feature headlines that have typos in them that change the meaning to something humorous. For example, A headline that was supposed to say “freed journalists” instead said “fried journalists,” prompting a funny comment from Leno.
On Monday, Leno poked fun at a Journal cover photo, in which the headline said, “Here’s Summer” with the photo (shown next to this column) of three solemn-looking guys in winter coats and stocking hats. Leno’s comment, word-for-word “Here’s The Daily Journal. It says June ’09, Here’s Summer. Really? Where is summer, Antarctica? What summer is that?” The comment was followed by a moderate dose of laughs.
The Journal has made the Leno show before. In 2005, Leno held up a copy of The Journal's Year in Review section featuring the top stories of 2004. The lead story: Police shoot and kill fugitive. The second story: Meth rises in area. The third story: Garbage cans hit the curb. Obviously, we have been tagged by Leno’s writers as a “newspaper of interest.”
(We also suspect that the cover was turned in by our IT staff. The Alabama natives who haven’t seen snow before apparently got quite a kick out of our cover when they came up for a visit in June.)
So for those interested, here’s the backstory:
The photo was taken by reporter Trisha Marczak during the May 2008 fishing opener on Otter Tail Lake, near the boat access on the southwest corner (near Zorbaz). The three guys in the boat, as we have recently discovered, are (from left): Danny Bogenreif, Zack Kropp and Lucas Tschakert of the Breckenridge area.
The reason they are bundled up: it was dang cold during the May 10, 2008 fishing opener (54 for a high, 34 for a low, to be exact. The reason why the guys in the photo are solemn-looking: they were cold, and according to Trisha, they didn’t really want their picture taken.)
That part, of course, is obvious. What may perplex many would be why we would run a photo of three dudes in winter coats shivering in a boat on the cover of Here’s Summer, which is a version of our summer Resorter publication that is inserted into The Journal.
The answer: we always try to run a fishing photo on the cover of our June Resorter, and a good source of fishing photos is the fishing opener from the previous year. Sometimes, the most obvious element – does one really think of summer when looking at this photo – obviously, gets overlooked.
Ironically, many who have asked me about The Journal’s 15 seconds of fame on Leno have commented, “Well June in Minnesota does get that cold sometimes.”
Embarrassingly true.
Joel Myhre is The Journal’s general manager. E-mail him at joel.myhre@fergusfallsjournal.com
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