Unmuddling a sentence or two

Found this group of mangled sentences in an Editor and Publisher story this week on the travails at Tribune (including the funky way it structured its buyouts). If you haven't read it, I recommend it.

But to the point at hand where an editor should have gotten out the untangling wand:

Between them, Charlotte Hall and Earl Maucker have more than 50 years of combined newspapering experience. But both editors, who run the Sentinel and Sun-Sentinel, respectively, admit the changes in the past few months exceed any they have seen in their long careers.

"It is the most profound change in my lifetime in journalism," Hall, the Sentinel's newsroom boss since 2004, says of the current newspaper climate. "It is a very hard time for staff, we try to be as fair as we can and move as quickly as we can."

There are three yellow flags. First is using "respectively." That's not a good idea in almost every circumstance. It forces readers to go backward to match things up. Readers going backward are also readers more likely to back entirely out of your story.

Second is using "admit." It's a word loaded with all sorts of negative connotations best avoided unless a true admission is taking place.

Third is the tortured attribution of the quote. The verb (says) has to be moved so far from the name because of the almost-always lame practice of using the "says of the ......" attribution. If you have to explain to your readers what she was talking about after she's said it, either find a better quote or set up the one you have better. In this case, is there any lack of clarity of what she's talking about from the previous graf? So let's try this:

Between them, Charlotte Hall and Earl Maucker have more than 50 years of combined newspapering experience. But Hall, who runs the Sentinel, and Maucker, who oversees the Sun-Sentinel, say the changes in the past few months exceed any they have seen in their long careers.

"It is the most profound change in my lifetime in journalism," said Hall, the Sentinel's newsroom boss since 2004. "It is a very hard time for staff, we try to be as fair as we can and move as quickly as we can."

I'd use a semicolon in that last sentence, too, but I know the increasingly common practice is to allow the comma splice in quotes. Such untidiness is easily fixed if you look for the warning flags.