Scholarship Winners

Very happy to see this year's ACES scholarship winners.

Copy Editing as 'Manufacturing'

Charles Apple has a pretty comprehensive report on the cutbacks affecting copy desks, specifically at Tribune. When Trib started its "shared content" stuff a couple of years ago, you could see what was coming while hoping someone with common sense and a belief in quality would prevail. Nope.

What's Next

Perhaps you've already heard, but John McIntyre, second president of the American Copy Editors Society and a frequent workshop leader, departed from the Baltimore Sun yesterday. He is, I'm sorry to say, yet another loss from the newspaper industry, which seems hellbent on removing as much talent as possible. What's the endgame? I don't think that there's a real plan.

I used to know editors at virtually every major and many, many midsized and small papers around the country, mostly a result of having worked as a newsroom recruiter. When we were first getting ACES up and running, those contacts with fairly invisible copy editors paid off and then, through ACES, expanded greatly.

I do believe that I now know far more ex-newspaper people than employed ones, which is something we might ordinarily have expected to happen well into retirement but not now in the disaster that the industry is experiencing.

My recommendation to ex-newspaper types is to try TV or other news websites. Online isn't all that different from print, though there are people who try to cloak online work in mystery. Sometimes different standards apply; there's more intertwining of business and editorial than some people would like. But there's a chance to really do good work in a field that needs our help. Just check out some online headlines on many news sites and you'll see where your services are needed. A lot of people are considering a shot at teaching but I can tell you that a.that's hard work that doesn't pay well b.colleges are cutting back, too.

My other recommendation is that ex-newspaper people expand their credentials with some technology training--video, flash, etc. because that's where journalism is headed--telling stories in multiple ways on different platforms.

ACES Fights the Good Fight

I'd been hoping to sneak off to the ACES conference this week, but alas, family schedule complications got in the way, again. Not that I regret the family stuff, at all, but I really do miss ACES.

But the organization is valiantly carrying on, even as some other organizations have had to cancel their annual meetings, and ACES' leadership deserves a lot of credit for doing so. As newspaper jobs and spare money disappear, there are dwindling opportunities for professional training, so good for ACES.

Among the registrants is student Emily Ingram, who will be working as a copy-editing intern at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this summer, and who will be blogging for the ACES website. Emily seems to have a multimedia approach and I'm looking forward to reading what she and others have to say about the conference, and to working with Emily in other capacities in the future.

Good luck to all--Chris, Deirdre, Daniel, Anne, Bill, Neil, et al.

Layers of Commas

Sometimes, the Onion is just too good to pass up:
Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere
WASHINGTON—In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation's sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. "This, is an unsettling trend," columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. "We're seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries." Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…

Shimmy, Shimmy

I am seriously at a loss to figure out how 186 square miles of land can undulate. Any ideas?

In Unicoi County, Tenn. -- an undulating 186-square-mile swath of former tobacco land -- a number...

No Attention Here

Crew members stand at attention during the commissioning ceremony of the Navy's new missile destroyer Stockdale at Naval Base Ventura County in Port Hueneme.

Nope. These sailors are most definitely NOT standing at attention--the giveaway is their hands behind their backs. It is clear that many newsrooms have not had people with military experience for a very long time. This kind of error shows up regularly, though I'm still mystified by a story a few years ago that referred to a corporal in the Navy.

Visualizing the Credit Crisis

Sree posted this on his Facebook page. It's excellent.