For the last six months, The Gazette has done an admirable job covering the 500-year flood that covered downtown Cedar Rapids in June and the city’s recovery since. Local stories by local writers about local people and local challenges. This week, the organization looked back at the changes the flood wrought, and put all of its flood stories in one place.

But one of the challenges of covering the same story for six months is not feeling redundant about using the word “flood” over and over.

In the first three grafs of today’s A1 centerpiece under the hed and deck “Will it happen again? Experts: State, global conditions point to more flooding in future” (the online-friendly hed is Likelihood of another flood rising, experts say“) the flood is called:

• the great flood of 2008
• the 31.12-foot-tall, 1.6-mile-wide tsunami that swamped Cedar Rapids
• an already record-shattering flood
• the epic surge that engulfed 10 square miles of the city

But, to paraphrase Freud, sometime a flood is just a flood. Or just a 500-year flood. Any way, you don’t need to write with a thesaurus by your side; we know what flood you’re covering.

This isn’t about this story’s writer, Orlan Love, who worked on a nice multimedia piece about the Cedar River a few weeks back. Its about the difference between calling a banana a banana and calling it an elongated yellow fruit. Nothing wrong with the occasional “deluge” or “epic surge,” but the words will have more impact if they are used sparingly.

(To answer the question asked in the story’s hed: With just two and a half weeks remaining in 2008, chances are the floods of this year will not happen again. But I’m no expert.)

Luckily you had the forethought to build a database. Now make sure you’ve got a Twitter hashtag set. Then, on Friday, get some video! Do a live chat! Saturday, make sure you run a front page story on the phenomenon that, by at least one news organization’s admission, is no longer a surprise to anybody.

I understand the argument that we should cover what people are interested in, but if we must cover — and give such prominent play to — Black Friday shopping, at least we could do a good job. See guys, as Fev at Headsup put it, “Shopping doesn’t really need context.”

Perhaps it’s because Black Friday is the metro news equivalent to a new Brangelina baby, but the coverage is generally so useless. There might be interesting cultural angles, but “HOLY SHIT, PEOPLE ARE IN LINE AT MIDNIGHT TO BUY A $200 HDTV AT WAL-MART” isn’t it.

So let’s get away from speculating whether more or less is being spent this year and find stores willing to tell us if sales are keeping pace with last year’s. (Stores do have the ability to watch their sales in real time and probably know to the penny how close they are to last year.) Let’s talk to sales psychologists who could tell us why humans are driven to spend in herds and, maybe, how to resist. Could we look at how good of a deal some of these bargains really are? Maybe a “36 Hours“-style piece that plans out the 1 a.m. shopping spree.

Because unless you’ve got a story about locals being trampled to death, I’m really not that interested in stories about people shopping. And if you absolutely must push Black Friday off A1, there is that whole Mumbai thing you could put there instead.

The nicest A1 I saw was from Mr. Obama’s hometown tabloid, the Chicago Sun-Times. Simple. The Des Moines Register‘s was simple and effective and I’m a fan of not trying to make the headline do too much. We know who Barack Obama is and what his victory means. No need to do too beat readers over the head with your, um, hed. The Gazette‘s Yes, He Did! is too obvious (we saw tons of Yes, He Did and Yes, He Can heds today, best to avoid the cliche). The layout is striking, though. The Press-Citizen was apparently in a Star Wars mood after CNN’s Princess Leia hologram. Or perhaps those on the universal desk there are too young to know better remember the original movie’s full title (it was 1977, after all). The Sioux City Journal again tries to do too much. No need to root. Understated heds only, please. The worst was from the Weatherford (Oklahoma) Daily News. Simply awful. The Rockdale (Georgia) Citizen was awful, too; It led with a dog story (albeit a dog-attacks-school-kids story).