The new sheriff

I have high hopes for the new Times-Dispatch executive editor Glenn Proctor, because the Star-Ledger is a great paper, and also because he's an ex-Marine. He'll have his work cut out for him; yesterday I was catching up on the paper's Taylor Behl coverage when I read this howler:

Family members and officials involved in the investigation believe Behl met up with a friend and later had dinner with a former boyfriend and fellow VCU student at the Village Café, a popular grunge bar at Harrison and West Grace streets, also on the north end of the Monroe Park campus. [emphasis mine]

Is there seriously no one at the newspaper who could have caught that the style of music known as grunge hasn't had its own clubs, much less its own bars, in about a decade?

Certainly not the paper's pop-music critic, who's far too preoccupied figuring out how to transform herself into an object of desire for arteriosclerotic rock stars, or its self-proclaimed music expert and cut-rate Mencken impersonator Mark Holmberg, who when reviewing Lamb of God's live DVD offered blazing insights along the lines that such releases are for "fans only" (a: duh; b: the DVD went gold).

Yes, the bar is grungy. No, Tad doesn't hang out there.

It's unfortunate that Proctor won't have any say over the paper's wheezing editorial page (what will it take to send those bilious dopes shuffling off toward the light?) but I'm hopeful that he won't settle for reporters and columnists who leave the building only when sandwiches are involved.

So here's to him pushing the paper's staff to make that second phone call, to scour the public records, to file that FOIA request, to start breaking news that local blogs keep beating them to. In the story, Proctor sums up his philosophy (with elipses, apparently) as "Teams. . . . Break news . . . If we can do it every day, all the better."

This city, and that paper, have well-deserved reputations for wearing down ambition. Here's where that Marine training will come in handy.