Where's Our Bailout?

Phil Kadner of the Southtown (Ill.) Star, urges a bailout for another industry vital to Americans.

Related:
No one could have foreseen....

Acceptable in Headlines

Tastes are always changing but something produced in Baltimore this week caught extra attention and triggered a new debate. I have come to detest breezy/arrogant responses, however.

Reading and Writing on the Web

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind
Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming


Yes, absolutely. I find myself reading the same material that appears in print and on a Web site completely differently. The Web stuff is a race, with concentration on the content less thorough than on paper. This report would seem to simultaneously argue against complex but rich headlines, nothing new, and for using print materials if you really want to learn something or you simply enjoy the act of reading.

From this report:

...In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else. ...

OJR to Return

Ah, very glad to see this: The Online Journalism Review will be back, with Robert Niles again involved. We need more, not fewer, smart commentaries on the media and where it's going; what works and what doesn't.

USC Annenberg mothballed the original Online Journlaism Review in June. But Geneva Overholser, the new director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, announced today that OJR is coming back under the auspices of the Knight Digital Media Center and will publish new items twice a week. Former editor Robert Niles will be involved. The Knight Center is a collaboration between USC and the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley.

! ".?-:

National Punctuation Day is coming up next week. Copy editors and grammarians everywhere will be celebrating, no doubt.


From The Advocate:

By JUDITH FAIRWEATHER

Wednesday, Sept. 24, will mark the fifth anniversary of a day that warms this old copy editor's heart: National Punctuation Day.

Yup, it's another one of those odd holidays, like Grandparents Day (a conspiracy on the part of the greeting card industry to get us to buy more cards) or Bunker Hill Day (a Massachusetts state holiday that gives state workers another day off even though no one else gets to stay home).

But this one is different.

Five years ago, National Punctuation Day was created by former journalist Jeff Rubin. According to the Web site nationalpunctuationday.com, "what started as a clever idea to remind corporations and professional people of the importance of proper punctuation has turned into an everyday mission to help school children learn the punctuation skills they need to be successful in life."

Of all the holidays that could have been created, this one is one of the most needed. People today don't seem to know grammar and punctuation rules. Is the casual style of e-mail correspondence to blame? Or maybe we should point the finger at the new language of text messaging. As assistant editor of The Advocate, I have become its de facto copy editor. From what I have seen, we need to resurrect "Schoolhouse Rock," but this time place it during the morning and evening news rather than during Saturday morning cartoons.

Fighting Back

Will Bunch has it exactly right. The media is under attack and we must fight back.

The next 49 days will be critical...for John McCain, Barack Obama, and for America, to be sure.

But it's also going to be do-or-die for an integral part of what once made America special -- a free and independent news media that can make a difference in a functioning democracy.

Because there is a war for the soul of this nation going right now, and we the media are involved -- not as some would like to think, as some kind of passive UN peacekeeping force -- but as a party that is in the acrid smoke of combat, under attack in a manner that's little different from the way that parts of Georgia were overrun by the Russian Army a few weeks ago. And frankly, American newsrooms face a situation that could be described in similar terms to that former Soviet Republic -- nearly defeated, and demoralized, with few if any allies that are willing to come to our aid. And despite the dire situation, most journalists are cruising along toward Nov. 4 as if it's business as usual, and that is what I personally find most alarming.

That we're in a war -- and we're barely fighting back.

How About a DATEline?

A New York Times article explaining how a story from 2002 wound up wrecking United Airlines' stock for a day would seem to be a good argument for putting a date somewhere in the story and the posting.
And make sure you read the Atlantic magazine essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" piece cited in the Times. Nicholas Carr, author of the Atlantic piece, is dead on.

BBC Looks at Numbers

The BBC has been running a good series on numbers:
Surveys

Counting

Percentages

Averages

Causation


Others have done good work too; it's just nice to have a reminder, given some of the bad election-related numbers that are floating around out there. I have been intrigued this week by the way post-convention numbers for Obama have been represented. He got a big bounce. No, he didn't. All based on how the numbers are toted up.

And on a tangential note, wouldn't it be nice if the cable news networks actually did some, you know, news, especially in the mornings and evenings, instead of running nothing but blather, blather, blather on politics?
Update: and of course, there's the moment when blather turns INTO news, as when Republicans Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy forget that the mics are still on.


hat/tip/ TalkingPointsMemo

Editing as Sport

Frank Diamond writes about copy editing as an Olympic sport.

The Middle Ground

Deborah Howell at the Washington Post writes about copy editors.

There has to be some happy medium between having 12 people "touch" a story and having someone run a spell check that serves as editing while writing web and print heds, fitting the story to the layout and writing captions.

Nice comments from Dana Priest and others.

Make It Stop

Calling all apostrophe fixers (except those guys who defaced the sign in a national park)

hat/tip, Josh Marshall

Swing and a Miss

Aside from reaching a conclusion not backed up by the story, I find this AP-Yahoo headline biased. And for some reason, you can cut and paste the text of the story but not the headline.


Democrat's Vision Will Collide With Reality


WASHINGTON – Barack Obama is accepting the Democratic nomination Thursday night with a lofty vision for the nation's future that is far easier to articulate than to accomplish.

The next occupant of the White House will inherit a half-trillion-dollar budget deficit that will severely crimp any plans for spending on new programs, as well as the messy endgame of the war in Iraq and growing energy and health-care challenges. A look at Obama's promises and the realities he would confront:

THE ECONOMY AND DEFICITS

The promise: Obama has pledged to attack the weak economy with another stimulus plan to follow the $168 billion package of tax rebates for individuals and tax breaks for businesses that Congress passed last February. Obama's stimulus would include tax rebates, aid to state and local governments and increased spending for infrastructure projects. He would also increase spending in other areas such as alternative energy programs.

The problem: Obama's spending plans and middle-class tax relief will collide with the hard reality of exploding budget deficits. The Congressional Budget Office projects this year's deficit will hit $400 billion, driven higher by the weak economy and the stimulus program Congress has already passed. And the Bush administration is forecasting that next year's imbalance will hit an all-time high of $482 billion. Deficits will remain high because of the costs of extending the Bush tax cuts and growing demands on big government benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare as the baby boom generation retires.

and so on...

Why Does TV Bother?

The New York Times had a piece a couple of days ago on the vast amounts of money and energy the TV networks are spending to cover the conventions even as newsroom staffs are being hacked to bits. Which makes it even odder that the cables, in particular, would refuse to actually show most of the speeches and spend so much time repeating themselves, presenting the same two or three ideas endlessly, instead of covering the convention, commentary that could easily be done from afar. Of course, if they did that, they couldn't actually comment on events because their own network isn't showing them. I wonder if viewers, and by extension, newspaper readers, see any value in on-site coverage? There was a story a day or two that 15,000 media people were covering each convention. That's a stupendous number.

Turn on C-Span or maybe PBS if you can and want to really see the speeches in their entirety with little or no commentary. For pure theater, if nothing else, Dennis Kucinich was fantastic.

And I really wish TV would get rid its lineup of every single political "consultant" it pays and put on people of all views who aren't following someone else's agenda. I just heard someone refer to Biden's years in the Senate as "being on the federal dole" and it went unchallenged.

And what the heck is going on at MSNBC, which seems to be having a war with itself:

Olbermann and Scarborough:


Shuster and Scarborough:


Al Tompkins has created tag clouds based on speeches at the Democratic convention.

One Little Letter

I could probably do more than make fun of a typo but this is too good to pass up: What a difference one letter makes:

...His top contenders are said to include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Less traditional choices mentioned include former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, an abortion-rights supporter, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.

Not a Headline Name

From the Los Angeles Times

BEIJING -- Chanpim Kantatian from Thailand was a little worried that she might not make her country's Olympic team. So last year, she went to see a fortuneteller, who told her to change her name.
Headline writers in Bangkok might have suggested something like Madonna.
Kantatian chose: Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarakoon.
It seems to have worked. She won the gold medal Sunday in the 53-kilogram class.

Which sort of reminds me of a story the late Don D'Elia used to tell when discussing tight headline counts at The Hartford Courant, though I don't remember whether he said he'd actually written this headline or was just speculating about the Illinois football team becoming sick:

Ill
11
Ill

The AP's 'Professing'

The Associated Press likes this sentence about the Edwards-Hunter affair so much that it crops up in at least three stories under three different bylines.

A former Edwards campaign staff member professes to be the father.

But "professes" often suggests doubt, at least to me.

Given the accusations of political bias at the AP Washington bureau, maybe words should be chosen a little more carefully.

Word Quiz

Common words quiz is a lot of fun.

Note some words not on the list: Weigh, lawmakers, mull, linked, firestorm, etc.

What We're Talking About

Several of us, colleagues at a newspaper years ago but now mostly scattered to the winds geographically and choices of other careers, have been engaged in an interesting e-mail discussion provoked by the E&P article by Thomas "Dennie" Williams about staff cutbacks and investigative reporting. Topics include the failure of newsroom people to answer e-mail or phone messages (absolutely not a new issue but one that seems to have worsened in recent years, some people think), the damage to reporting and editing from the cutbacks, the viability of print at all and a bunch of other matters.

It makes me wonder how many similar conversations are going on among other groups of former colleagues and how their observations might be brought together and put to good use. There's remarkably little harking back to the good old days in this e-mail exchange--although one person did manage to dig up a picture of me from 30 years ago-- but instead a lament, certainly, for the lost ability to tell good stories and root out the bad guys. You know, keeping true to that old that hokey line about comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable.