I’ve heard this story about other papers, but I’m pretty certain that the joint editions that come out on weekends have always been the Detroit News and Free Press. (I’ll ask my dad – he works for the News – but I believe I’m right about this.)
The local paper here is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – not a hugely weird name, but it has sort of a nice ring to it.
I work for the News-Journal formed by the merger of the Daily News and the Morning Journal when this town apparently got too boring to fill two editions a day.
I direct your attention to the website of The Telluride Daily Planet, “The Newspaper For People Who Love Telluride & The San Juan Mountains.”
In Connecticut we have the Hartford Courant. I beleive it derives from the French (?) word for running. It causes confusion when kids are given “current event” assignments, because they are under the impression that it is spelled “courant” and that they all have to come from the same paper.
I believe that one is from the phrase “gone where the woodbine twineth and the moon ceaseth to shine” meaning vanished, which is a strange name for a newspaper, unless in the sense of recording that which has taken place and thus gone. Still it’s strange.
And here in Oregon, of course, we have The Oregonian, commonly referred to as “The Big O,” as it’s the largest paper in the state by a factor of four, I believe.
Let me add another to the list of unusual. I had the honor of working eight years for a very small circulation weekly called The Reminder until the weekly bought the cross-town daily and merged into one of the more staid, respectable and boring names (“Chronicle,” in this case.)
Others from the Beaver State:
Albany Democrat-Herald
Curry Coastal Pilot
Coquile Valley Sentinel
Polk County Itemizer-Observer
Wallowa County Chieftain
The Register-Guard
McKenzie River Reflections
Molalla Pioneer
Dead Mountain Echo
Redmond Spokesman
South County Spotlight
Stayton Mail
There is an entire group of newspapers in Michigan called the Eccentric group. All small-town papers called the ______ Eccentric (depending on the town).
Interesting. I had done a Google search for “Woodbine Twiner” to make sure it was a real newspaper (I found the homepage of the publisher’s daughter…) but I missed the literary allusion. In Shakespeare, though, doesn’t the woodbine “gently entwist”? (A newspaper named The Woodbine Entwister would be truly bizarre.)
So what about The Vedette? Almost all the Google hits I get for that word are in Italian or French. Google translates “vedette” from French as “high-speed motorboat”. The Italian translation (“lookout-posts”) makes a little more sense as a newspaper name.
I was going to mention the Banbury Cake, but thought I had better check first.
The Leaf-Chronicle of Clarksville, Tennessee always struck me as odd.
No cite right now - but I believe the “gone where the woodbine twineth” phrase was originated by Mark Twain. I once spent ages googling for it, and his use of seems to be earliest.