Doesn't help that the typefaces are virtually the same.
However, neither is a particularly original idea.

Pennsylvania "Flattery" or be it coincidences. From my perspective I do wholeheartedly agree neither is a particularly original idea.

A very good example of life as it is in 2005. I have noticed more and more a flow toward a sameness, not only in information presentation, but in many aspects of our daily life. Blame or causes. Who knows? It could even be us, what John Q public wants or needs. It could also be what they, corporate America believe we want or think we need as a society. Go to any large city and they all look the same. Restaurants a very good example. If you chose you can eat the same meal border to border in any state in the union. I call it food for dummies. If you want to find a meal when traveling around the United States other than mainstream you might want to get on the old trusty computer and search before you go. We also have shopping for dummies, fuel for dummies and news for dummies. From the fast food industry, malls and shopping centers and (gas stations, I use that term loosely), that’s another story for another time and place.

I have noticed a trend or pattern in media presentation from television, billboards, magazines and of course news in the print version. On or off the web we are looking at a web page format. It could be simply because it works, or it could be some or all of the aforementioned reasons that every thing is becoming moreover the same. I do enough reading, for the most part on the computer, to know that all print media is running a battle against the computer for market share. Yahoo today had an article on the ever growing trend of the public to get their news from the web. No surprise to me. You can have it your way. On the web you can find everything from info bites as offered on your average television news program or you can go as in-depth as you care to go. If you buy a news paper or a magazine for instance you get one writes or editors view one that story, on the web you can with a few clicks you can usually get as many views or slants on a particular story as you can handle. It would be no shock to me if you surf the web enough you will find that same font used by both the Wilkes Barre Citizens Voice and the Harrisburg Patriot News.

As to the font. The same yes, but the font and its uses is a study in it’s self. Any and all business, advertising to news print and all between put forth a major effort into the font chosen for their particular project. Whatever the use the font chosen is important to the presentation. It is no surprise to me that two news papers whatever the distance from each other to use the same font. If you could look at all of the news papers across the USA alone you may find many papers using that very same font. It works.

In many instances we are offered too many choices. Have you bought a phone lately. I suggest you do your homework on the web before you go to Walmart to make your choice. All of the writing has gotten me hungry. A burger and fries would go good right about now. All I need to do now is decide if I want to go to Wilkes barre or Harrisburg to pull up and say supper size that will ya.

By the way I wanted this to be easy to read so I used Times New Roman 12 point. Might be no one will read this anyway , but if I used say, Vivaldi. 10 point.

If a graphic artist rips off another paper's design wholesale it's called flattery or coincidence, but if a reporter or someone giving a speech does it...

Also... the "news" people receive on the web is largely all taken from one or two wire reports. If you were to search on Google News or Yahoo! for any particular story, you will more than likely receive the same wire report over and over again. And, more than likely, you'll be reading it off of a newspaper's website. The reason why more people turn to the web for their news is because it is convenient while surfing at work, not for the breadth of coverage. This convenience is the same thing discussed in newspaper offices all over the country -- it's just another distribution point, it's circulation. Those same readers will just as soon read the newspaper somebody left on the lunch table when there's no computer around.

"What works" is not the same thing as "web page format," either. Web design started out as garish html...yellow backgrounds, a bunch of blinking headlines and flaming logos. The concepts adequately described in Ogilve on Advertising were found to work well in the wild, wacky, world of the web, too.