...why can't today's journalists compose a simple sentence without screwing it up?

It's not such a big deal if a poorly written sentence is buried in the body of an article, but when the first sentence has a boner like this one does I just don't feel like reading the rest of it.

I was an English major in college, and that sentence wouldn't even have passed muster in a high school composition class. And this is far from the first time I've seen this in news stories, especially in recent years. What do they teach in journalism school these days?

...staff cuts.

Our newspaper, already in sad condition, was purchased about a year and a half ago by a prominent local real estate developer, "Papa" Doug Manchester. He uses it as a bully pulpit complete with front-page editorials, and as such he's motivated to keep the print edition alive.

He cut staff way back from its already skeletal level, replacing experienced writers and editors with green ones. The price for home delivery is approaching a dollar per day. If reading it wasn't such an integral part of my morning ritual, I would have dropped it long ago.

Needless to say, the quality of writing and editing has sunk to the lowest level I've seen in the more than 50 years I've been reading the paper.

BTW, on my first "real" job as a technical writer for a bank in the early 1980s, I had a supervisor who had an MA in English Composition. She would have flogged me silly for a sentence like the opener of the cited article. OTOH she was fun to work for, and made me acutely aware of hacked sentence structure; in particular ambiguous or misplaced modifiers - Man killed by police with axe, the antique piano was sold to a woman with spindly legs, etc.

news-copywriting to India. The name on the article is actually an editor. The writers get the 5 W, from news wires and the net. They e-mail it to the named reporter who puts it into an article. Outsourcing, ain't it grand!

Would it have been THAT HARD for the copy-editor to fix this sentence, like so? Especially considering it's the lead sentence of the article? Jeez...