Close Enough Isn't Good Enough

Words matter. When paraphrasing, it's never a good idea to get ahead of the facts, as this Politico story about Ted Kennedy does in describing his efforts to get a successor chosen.

In his final days, he focused on a narrow political goal, pleading with state to change state law to posthumously fill his Senate seat with an interim appointee who would be a vote in favor of the health care legislation he championed.


Not really. The letter urged a replacement, certainly, but made no mention of health care. Kennedy definitely didn't ask anyone to "fill his Senate seat with an interim appointee who would be a vote in favor of the health care legislation" he supported. The problem with sloppy paraphrasing is that it creeps into the conversation. Someone else picks up this language, writes the same thing, and then pretty soon you have the dying Kennedy trying to skew the law and selection process for one goal only. Not true, as you can see from this WashPost story.

The letter, first obtained by the Boston Globe, asks the state's Democratic-controlled legislature to allow Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D) to select a temporary replacement should a vacancy occur. Such a move would reverse a provision in state law that says a vacant U.S. Senate seat can be filled only through a special election held at least 145 days after the seat comes open, which would leave Massachusetts with just one senator for several months.

Left unsaid in the letter is the fact that the change could ensure that Democrats do not miss a key Senate vote should Kennedy die amid the debate on health-care reform, long one of his passions. Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate with Kennedy present, and they might need every one of them if the chamber's 40 Republicans are united in opposing a reform bill.

"I strongly support that law and the principle that the people should elect their senator," Kennedy wrote in the letter, dated July 2 but sent to state officials this week, referring to the provision calling for elections to fill vacancies. "I also believe it is vital for this Commonwealth to have two voices speaking for the needs of its citizens and two votes in the Senate during the approximately five months between a vacancy and an election."

And on a related note, I wonder why so many really sickening Photoshopped pictures of Kennedy appear in the top Google search returns.

Making Assumptions

Speaking of generational issues when writing--and I'm really not militant on this issue--people should not write stupid stuff like this. Knowing one thing doesn't preclude knowing something else.

To assume there's an age component to technology knowledge or awareness is foolish. Sure, I know lots of older people who don't keep up with the latest technology, usually because they're too busy with their lives to track everything new. But I wouldn't assume they didn't, just based on age.

Too bad an editor, of any number of years but with some common sense, didn't save this writer from looking ignorant and condescending.


And it's not even a clever ref back to George Carlin.

12 Words You Can Never Say in the Office
If you're old enough to understand the reference in this headline -- George Carlin, anyone? -- then you're old enough to need a refresher course when it comes to talking about technology.

We've put together a list of outdated tech terms, phrases that you shouldn't be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old. This is especially true if you're looking for a new job. For example, on an interview, you should be talking about "cloud computing," not "ASPs" even though they are basically the same thing.

This list is useful for 20-somethings, too. Now when the senior person in the office uses one of these terms, you'll know what he's talking about.

Generation Gab

A couple of days ago, we were talking about the need to remain relevant for younger readers. How about accuracy concerning older generations?

Some people are blurring their labels, and, strangely, a few are trying to latch onto the World War II generation to make their political points.

I'm beginning to get tired of what I used to think of as Tom Brokaw's brilliant title for a book.

I remember seeing a woman screaming at one of the town halls about her insurance coverage and seeming to say that her father was a World War II "greatest generation" veteran. As if his veteran status had accrued to her.

Now,from Michael Steele's op-ed piece, we get this sentence: "That is why Republicans support a Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights, which we are introducing today, to ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care."

Except that seniors these days include Baby Boomers, you know, people like Bob Dylan, Tom Hayden and Arlo Guthrie. Not to mention longtime lefty activists like Ramsey Clark and Pete Seeger. I'm sure Steele doesn't have them in mind when he's identifying senior citizens as members of the greatest generation. And, on a side note, I wonder why no one ever points to the courage of Vietnam veterans when they're trying to make a political point about veterans' sacrifice and heroism. Wrong generation? Too soon to mention them as seniors? Hardly. Lots are collecting Social Security by now.

I'll leave the accuracy of facts in an op-ed piece to political columnists and bloggers, who have, in fact, been having a field day with it.

Loaded Language

I've removed the byline and identifying paper because I'm not trying to pick on them. But I have seen this construction a few times and it's bothersome. You can't take sides for the sake of what you think is a clever or dramatic lede.

There's also the problem of a reporter using the language of one of the story's subjects, even though it is rather inflammatory.

It also would have been nice if someone had asked Sen. Chuck Grassley if he meant this. Perhaps the quote is incomplete?

"I'm not going to vote for any bill I'm not going to read," said the senator.

What? He hasn't read it and he isn't going to?


Here's the story:

Tempers flare at Grassley meeting


POCAHONTAS - President Barack Obama is a fascist.
Never, ever, should we do this, especially with such a loaded line. You shouldn't have been writing this way to start with. In this day of SEO, this story could well wind up at the top of a search heap consisting mostly of politically charged blogs that are accusing the president of acting like Hitler. No respectable newspaper wants to wind up there.


This and other assertions flew through an emotionally-charged town hall meeting conducted by Sen. Chuck Grassley Monday in Pocahontas.
"The president of the United States, that's who you should be concerned about. Because he's acting like a little Hitler," said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. "I'd take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me."
Grassley met with constituents as part of a junket that also brought him to Humboldt, Ruthven and Rockwell City Monday.

No, a political trip to meet with constituents is not a junket, unless you've flown them all to Tahiti to conduct a fake town hall.


Harry Aden, of Jolley, said he came to the meeting to express his anger over the government's irresponsible spending.

"I wanted to explain to Chuck why we're so angry about this irresponsible spending since they've started the bailouts and stuff," he said. "I don't want this health care bill either, but that's just the straw that broke the camel's back. The real problem is irresponsible spending on all fronts."
You can't just borrow loaded language as your own. You've just said it's irresponsible spending. Not for you to say unless you're writing an investigative piece that can prove that.

Grassley seemed to elicit approval from the crowd on a number of key issues.
"I'm not going to vote for any bill I'm not going to read," said the senator, as the audience rang out with applause.
 
What? See above.




UPDATE: Fev hits on a similar goofball lede and ridicules it to death.

Past as Prologue

The question is whether we are going to continue to mourn the decline of newspapers on the grounds of nostaglia, quality, etc., or move our skills over to a new medium. I'm for the latter.

Copy editors as a group have never been shy about using new technology. What some of us are unhappy about is the replacement of traditional skills by technology itself, an emphasis on tech skills over everything else and a non-news mindset that has taken over, in some cases, at what were formerly news sites.

This article suggests we need to think in a new way, by looking at what has happened in the past. And it's time to fight for what we know is right instead of relinquishing the battle. It's simple, really: How do we preserve and practice good journalism with new tools? If we try to make it any more complicated than that, we lose.

WSJ Sightings: Terry Teachout on the New-Media Crisis of 1949 - WSJ.com

You May Strongly Disagree

Unemployed copy editors contemplating retail work until they can get back into the news biz should hotfoot over to this link to learn how to get hired. Or at least, avoid immediate rejection.

Wikipedia Comes to Its Senses

Very glad to see this:

Wikipedia to Add Editorial Review of Some Changes - NYTimes.com


By NOAM COHEN
Published: August 24, 2009

Wikipedia, one of the 10 most popular sites on the Web, was founded about eight years ago as a long-shot experiment to create a free encyclopedia from the contributions of volunteers, all with the power to edit, and presumably improve, the content.

Now, as the English-language version of Wikipedia has just surpassed three million articles, that freewheeling ethos is about to be curbed.

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.


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Faking the News

PR firm has interns post positive reviews for clients

Gagan Biyani at MobileCrunch, part of the TechCrunch site, has been reporting on a public relations firm that has been using interns to post phony, hyped reviews of one of its client's products. Surprise. Online reviews that aren't what they are supposed to be. I have seen more and more reporters relying on what they find online to fill in or even form their entire stories.

What a bad idea. If you can't track the person you're reporting on, by, say, having a real conversation with him, you probably shouldn't be quoting him. Yes, we've had print people fooled by fairly elaborate hoaxsters over the years, but the Internet makes it so much easier.

When it comes to winning in the App Store, one PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple’s App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client’s applications. Yeah, that 5-star iTunes app review you saw for the once top-5 paid app Enigmo? It might not be written by a real user, but rather by Pangea Software’s PR firm. Reverb isn’t the first to try and game the user review process, but they are definitely one of the most blatant cases.

Keeping Up to Date

The Beloit College Mindset List is out this weekend, and though several elements are disputed, it has its uses.

John McIntyre mentioned the inanity of a story reference to carbon copies. How long has it been since people used carbon paper on a regular basis?

While I try not to mention the wonderful head-spinning smell of freshly mimeographed paper for fear of creating a huge generation gap, I don't know that all cultural references die immediately when a newer generation grows up. And there's no deeper meaning to the Beloit list other than a reminder to keep references fresh.

Some of us can enjoy the list for things that have come and gone with zero impact on us. Others might use the list as a simple tool to avoid sounding too dated. The light impact of some of the mentioned items does make me wonder about the significance of Twitter or other technology, especially given the recent survey that found that younger people aren't using it much at all.

But Not Editing

AOL is booming, trying to create a significant news operation by hiring lots of journalists, but it's not the only one.

Can You Say Wiki?

John McIntyre is occupying his time writing enlightening commentary about style and writing rules, explaining newspaper lingo and other fun language-related stuff (including editor haiku.)

Someone on Facebook suggested to John that there may be a need for an "intervention" against the AP stylebook's errors and hoary rules, which leads me to nominate John to lead (no, I will NEVER say "helm") a kind of Editorpedia (there's already a dead-looking Editpedia) that counters or bolsters AP and other stylebooks.

I would defend the AP stylebook to an extent--at a time when our skills as editors are valued about as much as those of old-time elevator operators, I'm reluctant to trash anything that makes people think even a little bit about how to write, employ some decent grammar, etc. And I continue to wonder why we now reject rules we all grew up with as wrong or off track when there's no academy of language that says this is right, this is not. What's the starting point, folks? Who's the authority? I know, I know, there's always a pre-Shakespeare source to cite.


And, as far as the commentary going around about a Twitterer who treasures the AP stylebook--yes, it might be a little sad if that's all the person knows. But as someone who started in newspapers at 16 and in possession of as little knowledge of the world as you might infer from that, I found the AP stylebook to be a little treasure trove of information. I mean, who else knew why some countries' leaders were called prime ministers, while others were called premiers? Or offer a quick explanation of the world's major religions?

Yes, I've gone well beyond that, but I still page the stylebook just for fun, though not nearly as much as the gorgeous pages of a new American Heritage dictionary. And there are many great alternative sources of language rules and suggestions. But few serve so many people and publications and offer a common, basic approach that encourages at least some literacy and logic.

Now, if they'd just get rid of that damned no-split-infinitives rule...

Press Release as Reporting

Am I naive about how bad things are in newsrooms that someone on Twitter  thinks this is good advice?

"Use an AP Stylebook when writing releases. The less editing a pub has 2 do, the better."

I'm not knocking the Twitterer (I HATE the word Tweet, the way some people hate the word "moist.")  I just wonder how bad things have gotten if her advice is actually valuable.

The Reporter and The Hartford Courant

I posted something Saturday morning about Georgy Gombossy's departure from The Hartford Courant but there have been several updates since.

I don't know all the facts of this case. I did work with George many years ago and find it difficult to believe he would quit, after 40 years at the paper, over a column being held for fact checking. That said, there may well be other issues, and so my main interest in posting is to keep discussion going and perhaps flag a bad decision.

But I do know that the old rules of journalism no longer obtain at all newspaper companies and so what might have seemed unbelievable or truly contrary to good journalism practices may no longer be the case. Some people running newspapers these days--and this isn't aimed specifically at The Hartford Courant--simply don't recognize or respect the value of the franchise as truth-tellers and as the people's source of news, a community resource and institution. And a newspaper founded in 1764 and operated continuously ever since is an institution.*

When I worked for a tech magazine a few years ago, I was surprised by the number of tech company officials who would simply refuse to comment. They didn't believe in the right to know, thought they owned information and the press could go to hell. Coming from newspapers, I certainly wasn't used to that. Now those same kinds of people are often in charge of newspapers, or running companies and controlling the technology and conversation about journalism.

A few years ago, many of us fervently wished that some business type with a stake in the community would come along and buy the paper from the debt-ridden newspaper companies. Well, we got Zell. And plenty of others like him, some even worse.

This isn't good.

*Permit me a little memory. For years, the Courant's slogan was "The oldest newspaper of continuous publication." To which all of us wiseguys added, "to never have won a major journalism prize." But then it did, for 1992 (and did again in 1999). When the Pulitzers were announced for 1992, we Courant alumni then working at Newsday were ecstatic, far happier for The Courant than we were even for our paper's win that day, and even though we had to retire our smart-assery.

There is lingering affection and a need for respect for a grand old institution that can count Mark Twain as one of its own.

The State of Headline Writing/UPDATED

UPDATE 2: Incensed Copy Editor (See below) provides this similar link, to The Gleaner in Jamaica.

Would a person familiar with American English or the United States in general have written this headline?

An incensed copy editor e-mailed this today, asking, justifiably, whether the AP is outsourcing its headline-writing needs to other countries or whether this is really the state of American journalism these days. This assumes that this is an AP headline, and not one produced by the source newspaper. UPDATE: as Henry Fuhrmann points out, the version on AP's own page says "Mass." at this point, though it's possible it was changed. And when I Google the entire headline, the only place it shows is on newsday.com, which means the source is unclear.

Either way, it's absolutely horrible and the writer should think about whether journalism is the right career path.

US state rejects Madoff settlement offer.

Also, as the e-mailer notes this morning, Massachusetts is a commonwealth, not a state, so it's Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, not secretary of state.

Come on, people.

College Student Newspapers

Bryan Murley at PBS MediaShift asks why more college student newspapers don't have web sites. It's a good question, and touches on a favorite theme, which is that college journalism students aren't necessarily as cross-trained on platforms as some professionals believe. A number of times, I have been quite surprised to encounter journalism students whose web knowledge seems limited to knowing how to post on Facebook and other social media sites. And many of the college sites aren't as sophisticated as you might expect. So there does seem to be a continuing divide between print and other kinds of media students, one that smart and responsive journalism departments probably ought to address more than they already are.

Here's what Murley says:

Summer's almost over and college newspapers across the country will be cranking up to full speed soon. Likely, they'll be getting ready for further adventures in online journalism, expanding their online presence while attempting to keep the print product financially successful.

But hard as it is to believe, there are still student newspapers around the country that have no online presence at all. At the Associated Collegiate Press Summer Workshops recently, I asked for a show of hands from students whose newspapers didn't have websites. In two sessions, several hands were raised.

Newsroom Diversity

Economy tests media’s diversity - The Boston Globe

While hundreds of minority journalists are in Boston for a conference this week, industry leaders are trying to tackle a growing concern: how to preserve diversity in the nation’s newsrooms.

Yes. The country is growing more ethnically diverse. Now is not the time to give up on this effort to change the makeup of newsrooms.

But I wonder about several things and am awaiting the study that shows us just who is getting cut, a salary comparison, and some real numbers that show the justification for the huge newsroom cuts compared to advertising falloff. And are young minority journalists getting hired into jobs at lower salaries or different job descriptions to make numbers while not allowing real change at the top. We shall see, eventually, I hope.

Reporter Says Column Cost Him His Job

SECOND UPDATE: The fight moves over to Poynter.

UPDATE: The Hartford Courant Alumni Association and Refugee Camp and Watchdog Nation weigh in.

Former Hartford Courant colleague George Gombossy has started a new consumer web site in Connecticut, saying he was fired over a column he wrote about the paper's biggest advertiser.

My four-decade-long career at The Courant ended Friday as I was fired for doing my job – being the advocate for consumers.


My career began in June 1969 as a reporter in the Willimantic bureau and ended as the first – and likely last – investigative consumer columnist at the nation’s oldest newspaper of continuous publication.


The last three years have been the most satisfying, working as a team with literally thousands of consumers, shining the light on companies and public servants who failed to perform as promised.

There's Headlines and Then

David Weir at BNET Media ridicules AP's headlines, though it has to do with AP's dictates about republishing content.

Really, the headlines were usually bad enough when you could see them in their entirety. Maybe reprinting just four words will help.  This sort of reminds me of an old Wall Street Journal headline on a piece about how everyone is too busy to complete their projects, with a headline that read, "We were much too busy to finish this h...."

Gannett and Tucson's Archives

The Arizona Historical Society vs. Gannett Co., Inc. - God Blogging (and more)

The society says Gannett has backed away from handing over archives that the locals want to preserve, archives going back to the days when Arizona was still a territory. Hmm. Really, Gannett?
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Huffington Post, PLEASE Hire Some Editors

I have been arguing for some time that web sites, half gossip and politics, half news, need to commit--either they're true journalism sites or they're not.

Many continue to go their own merry way, exhibiting no desire to clean up their act, improve their quality and so on. An exception is Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, which though left-leaning, does a lot of very good reporting, has decent headlines and never misleads.

Then there's the Huffington Post site, which continues to run really wacky "medical" stories and does not seem to care a whit about accuracy in headlines.

Even its own bloggers are getting annoyed. Taylor Marsh lets us know what she thinks about the bizarre "Bill Upstages Hillary...Once Again" on the story about Bill Clinton bringing back 2 journalists from North Korea, and parked it at the top of its page for most of the day. Plainly put, this is not a story about the Clintons, which one is getting the most attention or anything else but a piece about the ex-president's mission to North Korea. It's time for everyone to get over their obsession with the Clintons' relationship and simply report the news.

I care less about political viewpoints on these web sites--you don't have to spend more than a minute at Red State or Drudge or HuffPost to see the poitical viewpoint. But I do object to lousy, misdirected headlines if you think you're going to replace newspapers.

Hire some editors and do it right.

When Words Add Up

Nice piece on the value of editing, at the Mathematical Association of America.

Native Terms

A group over on LinkedIn is discussing the term "Indian giver," which still crops up in language. And while there's someone arguing against the time devoted to the discussion, the point is worth discussing.

Here's the posting:


Indian giver is a North American English expression used to describe a person who gives a gift (literal or figurative) and later wants it back, or something equivalent in return.

The term "Indian gift" was first noted in 1765 by Thomas Hutchinson, and "Indian giver" was first cited in John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (1860) as "Indian giver. When an Indian gives any thing, he expects to receive an equivalent, or to have his gift returned."

The consensus is that it is based on Native Americans having a distinctly different sense of property ownership as opposed to those of European ancestry. Early European settlers in North America misinterpreted aid and goods they received from Native Americans as "gifts," when in fact they were intended to be offered in trade, as many tribes operated economically by some form of barter system, or a gift economy where reciprocal giving was practiced. It is also theorized that this stereotype may have been coined or exaggerated by the conquering European groups to denigrate the native people as dishonest and thereby justify their conquest.

The phrase is considered a racial stereotype and is often offensive, as it implies that Native Americans commonly practiced this behavior.

I'd not heard it explained this way, so I find it useful.

The use of the word "squaw" gets a lot of attention, though not everyone agrees on its offensiveness.

We'll save the debate over Indian mascot names for another day. Actually, I don't think there's much of a debate: we white folks don't get to decide that we're "honoring" people by using their words and they find it an insult. It's pretty simple.

When a Band-Aid Won't Do

At the risk of sounding as if I'm piling on, I'm wondering how many newspapers, other than The New York Times, could afford to indulge in the Newspaper Copy Editors Full Employment Act, AKA, Alessandra Stanley?

Better yet, how many of you either in the business or forced out in recent months by stupid corporate decisions, would be willing to take on the job of Personal Copy Editor to a mistake-ridden reporter?

I'm holding back on commenting on whether the copy editor who started working on this error-loaded piece on Walter Cronkite and then had to set it aside handled it properly. I don't know the Times' system, and each paper has its own rules and culture about how to deal with story hand-offs. Obviously some are better than others.

But one thing about these trying times: if you've got someone who is adding to the work of a depleted staff, please, think some more about what to do. When people are bleeding all over the battlefield, and your company is down to platoon strength, you can't afford to stop to put a Band-Aid on one of them. It really isn't a good use of your resources.

It's triage time.

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Piece

Aside from the false setup of the lede of this story, which misstates what the professor said, I really think we ought to look at our own actions and quality of work before worrying about how we're portrayed in children's literature. A lot of very good bloggers and other critics are ripping into us every day and we ought to be paying attention to their comments instead of being defensive. If we're right, then stand up. If we're wrong, we need to fix things.

A weak moment of kindness, which doesn't happen often, led me to remove the byline.

Baylor University professor says Harry Potter books may give children negative view of journalism

Could Harry Potter be to blame for the struggling newspaper industry?

No, but a recent study by Baylor University journalism senior lecturer Amanda Sturgill indicates that the immensely popular JK Rowling series of books is not helping.

Sturgill and two others — Jessica Winney of the University of Houston-Clear Lake and Baylor’s Tina Libhart — analyzed all the quotes in the first six books of the series that made any mention of media, including newspapers, magazines, radio and textbooks. What they found is that the books largely “present an unnecessarily pessimistic view of journalism today,” Sturgill said.

And, Sturgill says, because books children read, whether fiction or nonfiction, can play a powerful role in helping children learn about the world around them, there is a good chance that the negative portrayal of journalists in Rowling’s books could sway their perception of the field.

There was an example here and there of positive portrayals of journalists, Sturgill said, but those mostly involve The Quibbler, a tabloid that doesn’t really represent mainstream media.