Star Tribune: Do send the Sara Jane Olson headline back

The speculation about whether California authorities would let Sara Jane Olson serve her parole in Minnesota didn’t survive the morning news cycle: They are (h/t Polinaut). Within a few hours of hitting the front step, the Star Tribune’s banner headline (“Pawlenty: Don’t send her back”) was not only ”overplayed” (Glean); it was obsolete and, worse, muddled the story.

The Strib meant the word “back” to mean “back to Minnesota,” but readers could be forgiven for taking it to mean “back to prison,” given the backstory of the Olson-on-parole saga. As the State of California’s press release tells it:

She was initially paroled … on March 17, 2008 … until legal questions were raised about her sentence calculation. … Olson was taken back into custody on March 22, 2008, and her release date was recalculated for March 17, 2009. (emphasis added)

The jump-page headline had the right four-letter word: “Pawlenty: Don’t send Olson here on parole” (emphasis added again).  And what do you know: That’s exactly the word that appears in the front-page headline on the version of the Strib cover (presumably from a later edition) that’s archived at the Newseum Web site:

Anyway, we should be grateful for any day our local papers’ front pages don’t look like this: