My former colleague Claire Abt tells me that there were so many things wrong with this that she had to share it:
New Jim Beam Red Stag black cherry-flavored bourbon
Kentucky apple martini — a unique cherry-apple flavor:
Jim Beam Red Stag bourbon, DeKuyper red apple liquor and sweet & sour, topped with squeezes of fresh lemon
[A brief pause to permit you to shudder]
This is still the land of the free, and it ill becomes anyone to disparage another man’s tipple, but, great Caesar’s ghost, this is monstrous.
My first alcoholic drink was bourbon and Coke, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. You can mix vodka with what you will, and you’re free to imagine that you can distinguish one kind from another. Gin as well can be mixed with many things, though tonic water is one of the better and gin achieves its apotheosis when combined with a little dry vermouth. Rum seems designed to mingle with fruit juices.
But whisky and whiskey — Scotch, Irish, and bourbon — with which only brandy can compare as supreme achievements of the distiller’s craft — should be granted their dignity.
If you like your bourbon with a little something sweet, mix it with a little sweet vermouth and enjoy a Manhattan.
But bourbon flavored with black cherry and mixed with red apple liquor and sweet and sour mix? [You may shudder once more.] Good Lord, it’s enough to drive a man to drink.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The quality of quality is strained
The remark from my interview with On The Media most frequently quoted, by Romenesko’s media news site at Poynter and others, is that “one of the things on the minds of publishers of online enterprises is a sense that readers on the Internet don't expect things to be accurate or very well done and, therefore, they are used to tolerating a much higher level of shoddy work, a much greater volume of errors and, therefore, you can sacrifice the quality on the web and it doesn't mean that much.”
I feel honor-bound to go beyond that to tell you that, to my deep regret, it looks doubtful that quality pays anywhere.
Professor Philip Meyer concluded, as well as he could from fragmentary data, in The Vanishing Newspaper that on balance, high quality in newspapers increased profitability.
But a year ago Professor Doug Fisher argued — persuasively, I now realize — that the quality of journalism that is enhanced by thoroughgoing editing costs too much and returns too little. Yes, you prefer articles that are factually accurate, grammatical, focused, and organized. You complain about articles that aren’t.
But you are not willing to pay what it costs to produce better stuff.*
Don’t take it personally. You never were. For more than a century newspapers have been a delivery vehicle for advertising, and the news, figuratively as well as literally, rode on top of the ads. The tributes to the late Walter Cronkite mourned the passing of his standard of journalism as well, but CBS gave us that gilt-edged news operation because it was raking in money from ads for deodorant and toothpaste and automobiles. Advertising subsidized news.
The financial situation for journalism has become so desperate with the collapse of the advertising model that some established publications are toying with proposals to set up subscriber fees. My former colleague David Simon argued forcefully for this in “Build the Wall,” a Columbia Journalism Review article urging the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post to erect a pay wall as a bulwark to preserve high-quality journalism.
Steve Buttry’s sardonic tweet in response to this article: “David Simon's next gritty HBO series will dramatize the deaths of newspapers who followed his advice.”
The likeliest consequences of erecting a pay wall are the departure of most of the readers and a further drop in revenue: The advertisers want to know that their ads are being seen by readers, who will vanish, and the remaining readers are unlikely to pony up enough to compensate for the lost advertising.
Newspapers are trapped between the accelerating collapse of revenue from print, though print is still where they make most of their money, and the failure to arrive at a sufficiently profitable business model for the Internet. In their desperation to keep going, they have had to sacrifice staff, coverage, scope, and quality. When the house is burning down, you get out with what you can.
Once journalism reconstructs itself on some new model that will produce enough income to support whatever level of reporting and writing and editing remains, there will surely be some publications, print or electronic, that are superior to others. But what quality exists will have to be subsidized, because you and I are not willing to pay for it on our own.
*Dearly as I love you all and grateful as I am for your praise and comments for this blog, I’m perfectly aware that if I asked you to pay to read it, you would melt away like Napoleon’s Grande Armee on the march back from Moscow.
I feel honor-bound to go beyond that to tell you that, to my deep regret, it looks doubtful that quality pays anywhere.
Professor Philip Meyer concluded, as well as he could from fragmentary data, in The Vanishing Newspaper that on balance, high quality in newspapers increased profitability.
But a year ago Professor Doug Fisher argued — persuasively, I now realize — that the quality of journalism that is enhanced by thoroughgoing editing costs too much and returns too little. Yes, you prefer articles that are factually accurate, grammatical, focused, and organized. You complain about articles that aren’t.
But you are not willing to pay what it costs to produce better stuff.*
Don’t take it personally. You never were. For more than a century newspapers have been a delivery vehicle for advertising, and the news, figuratively as well as literally, rode on top of the ads. The tributes to the late Walter Cronkite mourned the passing of his standard of journalism as well, but CBS gave us that gilt-edged news operation because it was raking in money from ads for deodorant and toothpaste and automobiles. Advertising subsidized news.
The financial situation for journalism has become so desperate with the collapse of the advertising model that some established publications are toying with proposals to set up subscriber fees. My former colleague David Simon argued forcefully for this in “Build the Wall,” a Columbia Journalism Review article urging the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post to erect a pay wall as a bulwark to preserve high-quality journalism.
Steve Buttry’s sardonic tweet in response to this article: “David Simon's next gritty HBO series will dramatize the deaths of newspapers who followed his advice.”
The likeliest consequences of erecting a pay wall are the departure of most of the readers and a further drop in revenue: The advertisers want to know that their ads are being seen by readers, who will vanish, and the remaining readers are unlikely to pony up enough to compensate for the lost advertising.
Newspapers are trapped between the accelerating collapse of revenue from print, though print is still where they make most of their money, and the failure to arrive at a sufficiently profitable business model for the Internet. In their desperation to keep going, they have had to sacrifice staff, coverage, scope, and quality. When the house is burning down, you get out with what you can.
Once journalism reconstructs itself on some new model that will produce enough income to support whatever level of reporting and writing and editing remains, there will surely be some publications, print or electronic, that are superior to others. But what quality exists will have to be subsidized, because you and I are not willing to pay for it on our own.
*Dearly as I love you all and grateful as I am for your praise and comments for this blog, I’m perfectly aware that if I asked you to pay to read it, you would melt away like Napoleon’s Grande Armee on the march back from Moscow.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Lazy day
Driving more than a thousand miles over the weekend proved to be a little more taxing than I had expected, and a necessary trip this morning with Kathleen to Sam’s Club (don’t ask; just don’t ask) failed, oddly, to energize me.
So today’s offering is a link to a transcript of the weekend’s interview on NPR’s On the Media, in case you missed it. You can also download the audio if you’re pining to hear my dulcet tones.
And — a real bonus — the comments include a billet-doux from the ineffable Robert Knilands. Don’t miss it.*
*I’ve resumed comment moderation here, so you will have to look elsewhere for his gnomic remarks.
So today’s offering is a link to a transcript of the weekend’s interview on NPR’s On the Media, in case you missed it. You can also download the audio if you’re pining to hear my dulcet tones.
And — a real bonus — the comments include a billet-doux from the ineffable Robert Knilands. Don’t miss it.*
*I’ve resumed comment moderation here, so you will have to look elsewhere for his gnomic remarks.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Forty years afterward
Thunderstorms could not dampen the enthusiasm this weekend of members of the Fleming County High School Class of 1969 at their reunion parties. *
Before you continue, you should now have been tipped off that this post is even less of general interest than the usual ones. Carping about grammar and usage will resume tomorrow. I don’t want to spoil the account of the reunion by pointing out that The Baltimore Sun has referred in an article to two parties reaching “an agreement in principal.”
I arrived in Elizaville on Friday evening in time to sit outside with a wee dram (or two) of Woodford Reserve and watch the sun go don over the hills. The old Early place is at the crest of a hill just outside metropolitan Elizaville. It was on the road at the crest of that hill that a minor skirmish of the Civil War occurred, when a Confederate recruiting party marching in from Johnson Junction met a Federal patrol marching up from Nepton. Musket fire was exchanged, with no apparent injury to either party.**
That would have been about 1862, when my great-grandfather acquired the property. The farmhouse was built by my great-grandfather about 120 years ago, and my mother, the last of the Earlys, lived there until her death in 2001.
The first of the reunion parties on Saturday was at the house in Flemingsburg that my classmate Larry Johnson has been restoring and filling with antiques. We posed on the front porch for photos that are likely to show up in this week’s Flemingsburg Gazette — if a little hastily, because a thunderstorm was running through.
There were the usual exchanges: “Why, John Early, you haven’t changed a bit.”*** That was, of course, the polite lie that people exchange in these operations, and I reciprocated as often as I could do so convincingly.
In the evening, we repaired to the McCartney cottage, thanks to Sidney McCartney Day and Marsha McNeill McCartney, at Park Lake, a private resort, and sat through another thunderstorm while relaxing on the screened-in porch and waiting for the burgers to mature on the grill. People kept repeating remarks, many of them ill-natured, attributed to me. Fortunately, I was in possession of the formulaic response from my first news editor, the late Bob Johnson: “Did I say that? [beat] That sounds like something I would have said.”
The reason for attending a reunion is to see how time has marked one’s old companions, and to see how one measures up against them. Well, those of us who still have hair have gone gray, and some of us are still working and some of us are not, but the personalities previously in evidence are still recognizably there.
It was enormously moving to be greeted with affection and enthusiasm after this long lapse of years. Feeling the evening breeze rise over the hill at the farm, where I spent so many childhood years reading and watching the play of the shadows of clouds over the fields and hills, felt like home.
Seeing my old classmates was like the return of the prodigal, known and welcomed.
*Lord forgive me.
**I was not there.
***These are the only people who still know what my name is. I haven’t been called “John Early” this often for decades.
Before you continue, you should now have been tipped off that this post is even less of general interest than the usual ones. Carping about grammar and usage will resume tomorrow. I don’t want to spoil the account of the reunion by pointing out that The Baltimore Sun has referred in an article to two parties reaching “an agreement in principal.”
I arrived in Elizaville on Friday evening in time to sit outside with a wee dram (or two) of Woodford Reserve and watch the sun go don over the hills. The old Early place is at the crest of a hill just outside metropolitan Elizaville. It was on the road at the crest of that hill that a minor skirmish of the Civil War occurred, when a Confederate recruiting party marching in from Johnson Junction met a Federal patrol marching up from Nepton. Musket fire was exchanged, with no apparent injury to either party.**
That would have been about 1862, when my great-grandfather acquired the property. The farmhouse was built by my great-grandfather about 120 years ago, and my mother, the last of the Earlys, lived there until her death in 2001.
The first of the reunion parties on Saturday was at the house in Flemingsburg that my classmate Larry Johnson has been restoring and filling with antiques. We posed on the front porch for photos that are likely to show up in this week’s Flemingsburg Gazette — if a little hastily, because a thunderstorm was running through.
There were the usual exchanges: “Why, John Early, you haven’t changed a bit.”*** That was, of course, the polite lie that people exchange in these operations, and I reciprocated as often as I could do so convincingly.
In the evening, we repaired to the McCartney cottage, thanks to Sidney McCartney Day and Marsha McNeill McCartney, at Park Lake, a private resort, and sat through another thunderstorm while relaxing on the screened-in porch and waiting for the burgers to mature on the grill. People kept repeating remarks, many of them ill-natured, attributed to me. Fortunately, I was in possession of the formulaic response from my first news editor, the late Bob Johnson: “Did I say that? [beat] That sounds like something I would have said.”
The reason for attending a reunion is to see how time has marked one’s old companions, and to see how one measures up against them. Well, those of us who still have hair have gone gray, and some of us are still working and some of us are not, but the personalities previously in evidence are still recognizably there.
It was enormously moving to be greeted with affection and enthusiasm after this long lapse of years. Feeling the evening breeze rise over the hill at the farm, where I spent so many childhood years reading and watching the play of the shadows of clouds over the fields and hills, felt like home.
Seeing my old classmates was like the return of the prodigal, known and welcomed.
*Lord forgive me.
**I was not there.
***These are the only people who still know what my name is. I haven’t been called “John Early” this often for decades.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
One more thing
Before I venture west to examine the marks of time on my classmates from 1969, a reminder:
I was mistaken about the broadcast of my interview about the state of copy editing on National Public Radio’s On the Media. It is scheduled for this weekend, running at 2:00 p.m. Sunday on WYPR-FM in Baltimore. (Listings may vary in your area.) You can also download the program from the On the Media Web site.
I was mistaken about the broadcast of my interview about the state of copy editing on National Public Radio’s On the Media. It is scheduled for this weekend, running at 2:00 p.m. Sunday on WYPR-FM in Baltimore. (Listings may vary in your area.) You can also download the program from the On the Media Web site.
Off to the Dark and Bloody
Even the unemployed need to take a little time off.
A week ago a letter arrived announcing that fellow graduates of the Class of 1969 at Fleming County High School have planned parties for this weekend. I will be heading west tomorrow morning and won’t be back in Baltimore until early next week. You’re left to your own devices until then.
Since I won’t be monitoring this site, I’ve decided, with misgivings, to cancel comment moderation before I hit the road. You’ll be able to comment at will over the weekend, but I don’t want to get back to discover that you’ve been misbehaving.
To tide you over, some brief items:
X is not alone
Mild-mannered copy editor John McIntyre, sometime chief of the desk at The Baltimore Sun, has campaigned for years against the stale devices of journalism.
McIntyre is not alone.
Fellow copy editor and former ACES president Pam Robinson has published on her blog, Words at Work, an eye-popping collection of the hack “not alone” transition from publications that ought to have editors who know better.
Grammar for chimps
Somebody had to do it, and, sighing at the necessity, Geoffrey Pullum has demolished the latest example of “Stupid Animal Communication Stories,” this time the BBC’s report on a study that supposedly says that chimpanzees can recognize bad grammar. They can’t.**
Before you complain about the headline
A tweeted observation by Bill Walsh should give reporters and editors cause to pause before they storm over to what is left of the copy desk to complain about a headline that misses what they thought was the mark:
I side with reporters more often than you'd think when such disputes arise, but I'd say misguided headlines tend to reflect muddled stories.
Tell it, Brother Walsh.
*For readers unacquainted with the lore of the Commonwealth of Kentucky — quick, name the other three states that are technically commonwealths — the area was a battleground for Indians before European-descended settlers took over, and it was the Native Americans who called it “the dark and bloody ground.”
**If they could, reporters then could presumably be trained to make the same distinctions, and the nation’s dozen or so remaining copy editors could join me in collecting unemployment benefits.
A week ago a letter arrived announcing that fellow graduates of the Class of 1969 at Fleming County High School have planned parties for this weekend. I will be heading west tomorrow morning and won’t be back in Baltimore until early next week. You’re left to your own devices until then.
Since I won’t be monitoring this site, I’ve decided, with misgivings, to cancel comment moderation before I hit the road. You’ll be able to comment at will over the weekend, but I don’t want to get back to discover that you’ve been misbehaving.
To tide you over, some brief items:
X is not alone
Mild-mannered copy editor John McIntyre, sometime chief of the desk at The Baltimore Sun, has campaigned for years against the stale devices of journalism.
McIntyre is not alone.
Fellow copy editor and former ACES president Pam Robinson has published on her blog, Words at Work, an eye-popping collection of the hack “not alone” transition from publications that ought to have editors who know better.
Grammar for chimps
Somebody had to do it, and, sighing at the necessity, Geoffrey Pullum has demolished the latest example of “Stupid Animal Communication Stories,” this time the BBC’s report on a study that supposedly says that chimpanzees can recognize bad grammar. They can’t.**
Before you complain about the headline
A tweeted observation by Bill Walsh should give reporters and editors cause to pause before they storm over to what is left of the copy desk to complain about a headline that misses what they thought was the mark:
I side with reporters more often than you'd think when such disputes arise, but I'd say misguided headlines tend to reflect muddled stories.
Tell it, Brother Walsh.
*For readers unacquainted with the lore of the Commonwealth of Kentucky — quick, name the other three states that are technically commonwealths — the area was a battleground for Indians before European-descended settlers took over, and it was the Native Americans who called it “the dark and bloody ground.”
**If they could, reporters then could presumably be trained to make the same distinctions, and the nation’s dozen or so remaining copy editors could join me in collecting unemployment benefits.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Deferring to the godly
In yesterday’s post on regrettable news leads, I said that one reason not to affect bogus King James English was to avoid giving offense to the godly. One reader commented: “I don't think the danger of offending th godly, or anyone else for that matter, is a good reason not to write something, or do anything really.”
On the contrary, when one is writing for publication, there are excellent reasons not to *** READER ALERT: VULGAR LANGUAGE PENDING *** piss off the readers.
In some articles, on some occasions, for some audiences, one avoids certain references or certain kinds of language — profanity, for example, or ethnic slurs. Among the things to take care with are religious references, because people’s religious beliefs and associations are held profoundly. (I myself, as by adult profession a high-church Anglican, understand all too clearly the danger of hinting that other people’s beliefs and practices are silly.)
If you are going to give offense to the godly, you had better do so for a good reason — to assert, for example, that, contrary to Scripture, the earth revolves around the sun, that it came into being much earlier than an October morning in 4004 B.C., and that its human inhabitants descended from more primitive forms of life, are points of established scientific fact, rather than to adapt the language of their sacred texts merely for some cheap and transient effect.
On the contrary, when one is writing for publication, there are excellent reasons not to *** READER ALERT: VULGAR LANGUAGE PENDING *** piss off the readers.
In some articles, on some occasions, for some audiences, one avoids certain references or certain kinds of language — profanity, for example, or ethnic slurs. Among the things to take care with are religious references, because people’s religious beliefs and associations are held profoundly. (I myself, as by adult profession a high-church Anglican, understand all too clearly the danger of hinting that other people’s beliefs and practices are silly.)
If you are going to give offense to the godly, you had better do so for a good reason — to assert, for example, that, contrary to Scripture, the earth revolves around the sun, that it came into being much earlier than an October morning in 4004 B.C., and that its human inhabitants descended from more primitive forms of life, are points of established scientific fact, rather than to adapt the language of their sacred texts merely for some cheap and transient effect.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Don't do this again
All right, I’m just a copy editor — and a cashiered copy editor at that — so you may wonder where I come off with attitude about how real writers write. (Several reporters have in the past.) In part, it’s because I was a reader first, and as a reader I identified stale devices with which writers, journalists in particular, imagine that they bring freshness and imagination to their work.
For fuller discussion, you should look at a compilation of cliche leads that Dick Thien offered to the American Copy Editors Society and a similar analysis at Bob Baker’s Newsthinking.
For some that I myself find particularly irritating:
Webster’s defines ...
First off, there is no Webster’s, or rather, no one Webster’s. Merriam-Webster is only one of a number of publishers using that name in the title. Second, giving a dictionary definition of a term as a starting point is such a fixture of low-grade sermons that a first-year seminarian, not to say a professional journalist, ought to blush at being caught resorting to it.
It’s official
It’s official means that some piece of information has been confirmed — meaning that you are telling the reader something already widely known. Usually readers expect a story to tell them things they don’t already know.
The conventional wisdom
The conventional wisdom is also something that the reader has already heard. When a writer starts by saying what the conventional wisdom is, it’s usually to move to some fresh take on the situation. Maybe the writer could just start with that fresh take.
The pathetic fallacy
If I ever catch you writing that storm clouds couldn’t dampen the spirits of any person or group at an event, or in any other manner attributing emotion to meteorology, I’ll see to it that you are locked in a room listening to recordings of Wordsworth’s later poetry until you scream for mercy.
Christmas came early
Unless a holiday has some direct connection with the subject of the article, it’s as relevant as the weather. Particularly to be shunned are cheap and obvious efforts at irony: Just on the eve of Labor Day, Joe Sixpack got the word that his factory was closing and his job was gone.
The rhetorical question
Have you ever wondered where reporters get their ideas?
No I haven’t, and since I have no intention of proceeding to a second paragraph, I guess I never will.
The clumsy misdirection
Laura Snapdragon eats turtles by the dozen.
The chocolate, caramel and peanut candies, that is.
The that is serves to say, “Looky here: I made a play on words.”
Onomatopoeia
Foom! Foom! Foom!
That was the sound of the rockets as they were launched into the night sky to burst into sprays of color to celebrate America’s birthday.
It’s recommended practice to avoid sound effects in the rest of the story, too.
The Jacobean gambit
For the love of Fowler, please do not ever attempt to imitate the language of the Authorized Version of the Bible (popularly the King James). You are apt to get the grammar wrong (the –eth suffix being grammatically proper only the with singular third-person form of the verb), or you will cloak some mundane secular phenomenon in the language of religion, giving offense to the godly.
The outdated allusion
As Jimmy Durante used to say, everybody’s trying to get into the act.
The reader doesn’t know what “the act” is, and, unless you have confirmed that your audience is geriatric, the reader is probably clueless about the Great Durante, who climbed that golden staircase in 1980 and whose last appearances on television dated to the early 1970s.
It’s a good idea to write for readers who are alive today.
The disproportionate comparison
Though 1968 is best known for domestic turmoil and the war in Vietnam, it also has a local distinction. That year Baltimore County began trying to rewrite its regulations governing outdoor signs.
One of these things is not like the other. ...
For fuller discussion, you should look at a compilation of cliche leads that Dick Thien offered to the American Copy Editors Society and a similar analysis at Bob Baker’s Newsthinking.
For some that I myself find particularly irritating:
Webster’s defines ...
First off, there is no Webster’s, or rather, no one Webster’s. Merriam-Webster is only one of a number of publishers using that name in the title. Second, giving a dictionary definition of a term as a starting point is such a fixture of low-grade sermons that a first-year seminarian, not to say a professional journalist, ought to blush at being caught resorting to it.
It’s official
It’s official means that some piece of information has been confirmed — meaning that you are telling the reader something already widely known. Usually readers expect a story to tell them things they don’t already know.
The conventional wisdom
The conventional wisdom is also something that the reader has already heard. When a writer starts by saying what the conventional wisdom is, it’s usually to move to some fresh take on the situation. Maybe the writer could just start with that fresh take.
The pathetic fallacy
If I ever catch you writing that storm clouds couldn’t dampen the spirits of any person or group at an event, or in any other manner attributing emotion to meteorology, I’ll see to it that you are locked in a room listening to recordings of Wordsworth’s later poetry until you scream for mercy.
Christmas came early
Unless a holiday has some direct connection with the subject of the article, it’s as relevant as the weather. Particularly to be shunned are cheap and obvious efforts at irony: Just on the eve of Labor Day, Joe Sixpack got the word that his factory was closing and his job was gone.
The rhetorical question
Have you ever wondered where reporters get their ideas?
No I haven’t, and since I have no intention of proceeding to a second paragraph, I guess I never will.
The clumsy misdirection
Laura Snapdragon eats turtles by the dozen.
The chocolate, caramel and peanut candies, that is.
The that is serves to say, “Looky here: I made a play on words.”
Onomatopoeia
Foom! Foom! Foom!
That was the sound of the rockets as they were launched into the night sky to burst into sprays of color to celebrate America’s birthday.
It’s recommended practice to avoid sound effects in the rest of the story, too.
The Jacobean gambit
For the love of Fowler, please do not ever attempt to imitate the language of the Authorized Version of the Bible (popularly the King James). You are apt to get the grammar wrong (the –eth suffix being grammatically proper only the with singular third-person form of the verb), or you will cloak some mundane secular phenomenon in the language of religion, giving offense to the godly.
The outdated allusion
As Jimmy Durante used to say, everybody’s trying to get into the act.
The reader doesn’t know what “the act” is, and, unless you have confirmed that your audience is geriatric, the reader is probably clueless about the Great Durante, who climbed that golden staircase in 1980 and whose last appearances on television dated to the early 1970s.
It’s a good idea to write for readers who are alive today.
The disproportionate comparison
Though 1968 is best known for domestic turmoil and the war in Vietnam, it also has a local distinction. That year Baltimore County began trying to rewrite its regulations governing outdoor signs.
One of these things is not like the other. ...
Monday, July 20, 2009
Things I wish I hadn't seen
On Twitter: “What I will drink for my (first) 39th birthday: Candied bacon martini.”
In addition to bacon baked with brown sugar, it includes vodka, applejack, amaretto and — brace yourselves — maple syrup.
In The Baltimore Sun: An article with an inane “They’re not alone” transition from the opening example to the body of the story.
It’s such a hackneyed device that it can always — and should — be deleted without any ill effect on the story whatsoever.
On Facebook: A newspaper copy editor saying that he doesn’t look at his own paper on his day off, because he’s not going to let his employer impose on his free time.
There’s not a lot that can leave me gasping in my chair, but for an editor to announce publicly that he chooses not to see what is in his own publication, as if laziness and unprofessionalism were a matter of principle, undercuts the effort of years to establish that copy editors should be taken seriously.
At You Don’t Say: Posts last week announcing that I had taped a recording for the weekend’s On the Media program on National Public Radio.
Evidently the producers of the show decided that I was not particularly interesting, a judgment that should not stun readers of this blog, and chose not to air the interview.
In addition to bacon baked with brown sugar, it includes vodka, applejack, amaretto and — brace yourselves — maple syrup.
In The Baltimore Sun: An article with an inane “They’re not alone” transition from the opening example to the body of the story.
It’s such a hackneyed device that it can always — and should — be deleted without any ill effect on the story whatsoever.
On Facebook: A newspaper copy editor saying that he doesn’t look at his own paper on his day off, because he’s not going to let his employer impose on his free time.
There’s not a lot that can leave me gasping in my chair, but for an editor to announce publicly that he chooses not to see what is in his own publication, as if laziness and unprofessionalism were a matter of principle, undercuts the effort of years to establish that copy editors should be taken seriously.
At You Don’t Say: Posts last week announcing that I had taped a recording for the weekend’s On the Media program on National Public Radio.
Evidently the producers of the show decided that I was not particularly interesting, a judgment that should not stun readers of this blog, and chose not to air the interview.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
How could this have happened?
There’s only one explanation: Mistakes were made:
Crocs
Microsoft Vista
Jon and Kate Plus 8
Fanny packs: Perhaps the last thing that broad-of-beam Americans needed was an accessory that emphasized their girth.
Abstinence-only sex education
The Apprentice: And any other television program, contemplated or actual, featuring Donald Trump.
McDonald’s McRib
Bruno
The Atkins diet: And the Metabalife diet, the South Beach diet ...
AIG
Knight Rider: All versions.
Jell-O shooters
Gladiator flip-flops: Actually, any flip-flops worn anywhere but to the shower or the pool.
Sport utility vehicles
Chocolate martinis: Actually any cocktail labeled as a martini containing anything other than gin or vodka and vermouth.
Tattoos
Crocs
Microsoft Vista
Jon and Kate Plus 8
Fanny packs: Perhaps the last thing that broad-of-beam Americans needed was an accessory that emphasized their girth.
Abstinence-only sex education
The Apprentice: And any other television program, contemplated or actual, featuring Donald Trump.
McDonald’s McRib
Bruno
The Atkins diet: And the Metabalife diet, the South Beach diet ...
AIG
Knight Rider: All versions.
Jell-O shooters
Gladiator flip-flops: Actually, any flip-flops worn anywhere but to the shower or the pool.
Sport utility vehicles
Chocolate martinis: Actually any cocktail labeled as a martini containing anything other than gin or vodka and vermouth.
Tattoos
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