Man vs. machine

There is excellent reason to suppose that the designer of the Bryant furnace/air conditioner in my basement suffered from demonic possession.

Removing the filter for periodic vacuuming of dust and cat hair is not difficult, but returning it means getting down on the knees, groping in the dark recess past a bundle of hanging electrical cords that probably shouldn't be pulled loose, trying to keep the wobbly aluminum frame of the filter from bending over itself instead of blocking the opening, trying to fit the little latch over the filter, repeating the process because the filter frame has come loose again, and — inevitably, every time — scraping the skin off the knuckles against some protruding edge of metal.

Such a struggle takes it out of a man.

And therefore, since I am at liberty today, if anyone else craves the benefit of a sustaining pint or two, I would find a little company to be salubrious. Fiveish or so? (Unless you’re pretending to work and won’t be sprung till later.) Hamilton Tavern, or some comparable Baltimore saloon? (Even if you’re paying, I’m not inclined to leave town. But send me your name, and I’ll drink to your health.) No reasonable offer refused.

Our vanishing heritage

You asked for it: some terms — hardly an exhaustive list — retrieved from newspaper lingo before these endangered print artifacts vanish like the passenger pigeon and the copy editor.

above the fold (adj. or adv.) A broadsheet paper, like The Baltimore Sun, as distinguished from the tabloid New York Daily News, is folded in half for display. The top half of the page, above the fold, is held to be the most important real estate in the paper. A reporter’s ambition is to get an article on the front page; a reporter’s supreme ambition is to get that article above the fold.


bang out (v.) A composing room (cf.) ritual in which an employee leaving the premises for the last time is commemorating by the pounding of pica poles (cf.) against metal surfaces in a commemorative clamor.

breaking news (n.) Unanticipated events developing during the publication cycle, requiring updates and occasionally wholesale revision of pages. Breaking news is conventionally greeted by profane expressions on the news desk, city desk, or copy desk.

budget (n.) also BJT The daily budget, or list of pending articles, either completed or imagined, typically discussed at an afternoon news meeting at which preliminary decisions about what is to go on the front page are made.

bulldog (n.) An early edition. The Baltimore Sun continues to produce a bulldog edition of the Sunday paper that appears Saturday morning. In a 60 Minutes episode in the early 1980s, Andy Rooney, then merely a spry sexagenarian, displayed a copy of the Sunday Cincinnati Enquirer and proceeded to discard all the advertising inserts and classified sections (“I already have job”), leaving a thin set of news sections. But the buy of The Sun’s bulldog edition performs the Rooney Shuck in reverse, discarding the thin news sections to retrieve the advertising inserts, the comics, the TV book, etc.

buried lede (n.) The central element of an article mistakenly appearing deep in the text. It must be disinterred.

burn off (v.) to dispose of articles that have previously been rejected for the front page or section front by running them on a day of low circulation. Look at your Monday paper.

byline (n.) The reporter’s name at the tip of an article; the most important component of an article.

chaser (n.) A page or set of pages typeset after the formal edition close to attempt to get breaking news (cf.) into the paper.

cold type (n.) Headlines and text produced on photographic paper and pasted up (cf.) in a composing room. Increasingly supplanted by electronic transmission of pages directly to a printing plant, where the pages emerge as metal plates to go on the printing press.

composing room (n.) The place in which printers, now vanished, once assembled pages in hot type or cold type.

copy editor (n.) An anonymous drudge who attempts, against great odds, to correct the many faults of writers before publication. Extinction imminent. (Cf. slot editor.)

CQ (abbrev.) An indication that the name or term so noted has been checked and verified. Copy editors, whose suspicions are well founded, often suspect that reporters use CQ to indicate “better check this.”

1st-lede writethru (n.) The first update of a developing wire service (cf.) article. Subsequent updates will be labeled 2nd-lede, 3rd-lede, etc.

goat-choker (n.) An article of inordinate and suffocating length, produced to gratify the vanity of the author and the aspirations of the publication. (Cf. Pulitzer-Prize-winner.)

graf (n.) Paragraph.

grip-and-grin (n.) A photograph of no inherent interest in which a notable and an obscure person shake hands at an occasion of supposed significance.

hed (n.) A headline, giving rise to the abbreviation HTK, for head to come, an article transmitted in a take or takes before it is in final form.

hot type (n.) Metal type generated on a Linotype machine. Archaic. (Cf. cold type.)

house ad (n.) An unpaid advertisement put on a page to fill a gap left by an lack of paid advertising. Often a promotional ad for the publication.

jumpline (n.) A line indicating a continuation, or jump, of an article on a subsequent page. Though readership surveys for generations have indicated that readers despise jumps and generally do not follow them, it does not suit newspapers to do otherwise.

lede (n.) The phonetic spelling of lead, the beginning, usually the first paragraph, of an article, so spelled as to indicate the specialized meaning rather than the common meaning to a Linotype operator.

Linotype (n.) A machine for the mechanical setting of type, the brainchild of Ottmar Merganthaler of Baltimore, to whom all praise be given. The Linotype operator used hot metal, melted lead, to create slugs (cf.) of type by manipulating a keyboard.

lobster shift (n.) Also lobster trick. The third shift on a daily newspaper, between midnight and 8 a.m.

nut graf (n.) The paragraph — if it exists — that explains the central point of an article, typically following a labored and self-indulgent introductory sequence of paragraphs.

pica pole (n.) A metal ruler used by printers in the composing room to measure type by picas (12 points to the pica, six picas to the inch). The pica pole is pounded against a metal surface in the ritual of banging out (cf.) an employee leaving the premises for the last time.

Pulitzer Prize (n.) The annual prizes in journalism, established by Joseph Pulitzer and administrated by Columbia University, to celebrate excellence in journalism and other categories; the Valhalla of the newspaper reporter.

off the floor (adj.) When a page has been completed and removed from the composing room (cf.), it is said to be off the floor. When an entire edition is off the floor, it is said to have been put to bed.

pasteup (n.) The assemblage of pages by pasting type onto page mockups, which are then photographed to be made into metal plates for the printing press.

Pulitzer-Prize-winner (n.) An article of surpassing artistry or investigative virtuosity, usually of considerable length (Cf. goat-choker), written for Pulitzer jurors rather than the readership of the publication, despite the unlikelihood that the former group will have read it in its entirety before bestowing the laurels.

reader (n.) An article devoid of immediate news interest that will supposedly be of interest to the readership.

refer (not reefer) (n.) A short summary attached to an article indicated a related story elsewhere in the publication.

rim editor (n.) A copy editor, a nonentity.

slot editor (n.) On a copy desk, the copy editor who checks and corrects the copy of other copy editors before approving it for publication. The term arises from the obsolete furniture of the newsroom, where once a horseshoe-shaped desk enabled the slot editor to hand out paper copy to the copy editors on the rim, the outside of the horseshoe. To slot (v.) is to check an article that has been copy edited before approving it for typesetting.

slug (n.) A line of type set in metal on a Linotype machine (cf.). Also the one-word working title of an article as it moves through production. SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) is a familiar slug for an article about a Supreme Court decision.

spadia (n.) An annoying flap of advertising copy that wraps around a portion of the front page of a section, preventing the reader from seeing the full page.

spike (n.) The spindle on which paper copy that was not to run was impaled, giving rise to the verb to spike, to kill a story.

stet (v., from the Latin) Let it stand; let the original copy go as written. The hardest word for a copy editor to use.

take (n.) A section of an article. An article that is transmitted to the copy desk or the composing room as it is being written is sent in takes.

telegraph section (n.) At The Baltimore Sun, the A section, in which national and foreign news was acquired by telegraph in the remote past. The copy was edited on the telegraph desk, a component of the copy desk.

thirty (-30-) A numeral indicating the conclusion of a take (cf.) of copy. Extended metaphorically to the verb form to write 30, i.e., to conclude a career.

tombstoning In page layout, to put articles side by side so that the headlines are adjacent. The phenomenon is also referred to as bumping heads.

tick-tock (n.) A step-by-step account of how a particular event or phenomenon developed.

wire service (also the wire) (n.) The Associated Press or other news service whose dispatches are transmitted electronically to the publication.

Now the treatment begins

Calm yourself. Help is at hand.

Earlier today this tweet went out from APStylebook on Twitter:

RT @emilynichols: there is little more beautiful than a freshly minted AP Stylebook. 2009! Is it wrong that I want to curl up and read it?

My re-tweet, one of a number of similar responses, simply began: God how sad.

Jason Wilson followed up to inquire:

Is this another sign that it's time to start organizing AP Stylebook interventions? This could be a new career for you.

Indeed it could. The doctor is IN.

The first thing to establish — you civilians can listen in to the session — is that The Associated Press Stylebook is not part of the Pentateuch. It is a handbook on certain conventions of writing, such as capitalization and abbreviation, along with advice on English usage and names of agencies and companies, and other miscellaneous information useful to journalists. It is not of divine origin or inspiration.

As such, it is one handbook among many: The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage; which chooses the opposite of AP usage in nearly every instance; the far more comprehensive Chicago Manual of Style, widely used in book publishing; the manual of the Government Printing Office for the manual productions of the federal government; and specialized handbooks for scientific and medical publications — none of which appear to induce ecstatic states when they publish new editions.

The point of such a stylebook is to establish consistency in practice to spare the reader distraction. So when there are two or more ways to write something — capitalized or lowercased, abbreviated or spelled out, a number written as a numeral or a word — a stylebook arbitrarily chooses one form. The AP Stylebook does not say that other choices are wrong, and some of the things it does say are not even right.

Now that APStylebook is on Twitter, it gleefully spreads such bursts of gush as the one above, to my mystification. The World Almanac is also on Twitter, but its readers don’t tweet that they stayed up all night reading this year’s edition. Perhaps it’s a copy editor phenomenon. Who else, after all, look into the AP Stylebook? (There’s precious little evidence that Associated Press reporters do.) Perhaps only a copy editor could quiver in delight at the prospect of discovering that rip off is preferred as a verb, rip-off as a noun; that heroes is the plural of hero (This is new?); that Pledge of Allegiance is capitalized — all part of the feast spread before the reader of the 2009 edition.

A further part of the excitement on the copy desk is the scope a new edition will give exegetes to convert guidelines into Rules. One example: When I was first at The Sun, my work was checked by a copy editor who was adamant that half a mile had to be changed in all instances to a half-mile, because AP said so. It was years later that Bill Walsh confirmed my suspicion of this dictum by writing in Lapsing into a Comma that no, both expressions are correct, and AP merely means that you have to use a hyphen if you pick the latter.

Now you have the pathology. Here is the treatment. You do not have to surrender your beloved AP Stylebook, which, for good or ill, is embedded as the house style of numerous publications. But the road to health lies in growing beyond it. Buy Brother Walsh’s book. There’s a new edition out of Garner on Usage, which you should find particularly well-informed and helpful. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage will fill many gaps in your education, particularly if your degree is in journalism.

Take a deep, cleansing breath. Get up from the computer and walk to the nearest window. Look out. There is a wider world there than is circumscribed by the AP Stylebook. Try to keep a little perspective.

An editor's haiku

The coffee is hot,
my hands poised above the text,
its vitals exposed

Regard the comma,
apt with the compound sentence,
not with compound verbs

An expanse of white,
regular ranks of black type,
and slashes of red

The patient labor
of the lexicographer
embiggens our tongue

So sweeping the claims,
so erratic the result —
Wikipedia

The writer who knows
how to use “comprise” rightly
will rise to heaven

Give up explaining
suspensive hyphenation;
insert as needed

A reporter’s hand
reaches for a thesaurus;
screams die in my throat

Too many “touches”
in processing the copy —
layoffs now impend

This writer’s in luck:
I have been turned down to serve
on a death panel

Too many hours
on a chair in the basement
perusing the Web

Previous efforts
emphasize the feebleness
of the work today

Best of Baltimore?

I tried to contribute today to the City Paper’s Best of Baltimore 2009 reader poll, mainly to nominate Elizabeth Large’s Dining@Large as the best local blog, but the software wouldn’t accept my nominations because I had fewer than 25.*

Anyhow, here are my nominations, along with a couple of categories in which I have views but no choices:

Best Neighborhood: Hamilton (of course)

Best Local Landmark: Fort McHenry

Best Park: Druid Hill

Best Place to Take Out of Town Visitors: Visionary Arts Museum

Best Oriole, Best Raven, Best Local Sportscaster: Oh please

Best Local Journalist: No entry here — not clear whether the category can include unemployed as well as employed, and I have just about as many colleagues in the former category as the latter

Best Local Publication: The Baltimore Sun, even in eclipse

Best Local Blog: Dining@Large. Elizabeth Large not only offers sound advice on food and restaurants, but she has fostered a genuine Web community among her readers. Come for the food; stay for the topic drift.

Best Independent Bookstore: Ivy Bookshop

Best Auto Repair Shop: Apple Auto on Harford Road (Hamilton again)

Best Liquor Store: Wells

Best Local Beer: Resurrection

Best Neighborhood Bar: Hamilton Tavern

Best Movie Theater: Senator (with hopes for its survival)

Best Reason We Should Invite You to the Best of Baltimore Party: 1. Last year I was working at The Sun and couldn’t attend; this year it appears that I’ll be free. 2. I didn’t nominate my own blog. 3. Sit next to me, and I’ll tell you stories.

Want to dispute choices? Want to add categories? You know what the comments function is for.



*Copy editors don’t get out much. Besides the City Paper categories don’t offer much for a person of my advancing years. Now if there had been a Best Bar Where You Can Have a Conversation Without Having to Shout Over the Music category ...

The tale of the gnome

In the old days, when copy editors left newspaper one by one, instead of being pushed down a chute with a man holding a sledgehammer standing at the bottom, a decorum of departure was observed.

The chief of the copy desk or some other minor satrap delivered a few gracious remarks, small gifts were presented, the honoree made a short speech of reminiscence and thanks, and cake was cut and served. Occasionally, outliers from other news departments would wander over, especially after cake was announced.

At some copy desks, of which The Baltimore Sun’s was one, the farewell gifts included jocular items. As you might expect, such jocular gifts often carried with them a back story or personal association.

At one point in my tenure at The Sun, there was a copy editor on the desk whom a fellow editor referred to privately, because of his physical appearance and a disposition that it would be generous to describe as grumpy, as “the Garden Gnome.” The gnome departed, and so, in the fullness of time, did the other editor. When the latter editor retired, one of the farewell gifts was a plaster garden gnome.

The former editor was held in such low esteem and the latter in such affection that it became a tradition on the desk to present a garden gnome, the uglier the better, to each departing copy editor. It generally fell to the managers to acquire the damn things, either plaster or — even uglier — plastic.*

I suppose that many close-knit groups develop such rituals — append yours in a comment if you like.

But the tale of the gnome has a little moral: If you are disagreeable enough to your colleagues, you can expect to achieve a rude immortality.



*On the day I was dismissed, I harbored five garden gnomes in an office cabinet. The pending purge had been well telegraphed, but I had underestimated its scope. And I myself left cakeless and gnomeless.

Credulity and skepticism

Fans (I am one) of Snopes.com, the “searchable database of urban legends and myths, email hoaxes, computer virus warnings, and folklore,” can only marvel at the boundless credulity represented by the nonsense that Barbara and David Mikkelson painstakingly research and refute.

There is the patently false report, propagated by Betsey McCaughey and subsequently spreading faster than the swine flu virus, that a health care bill before Congress requires that senior citizens be given counseling on euthanasia every five years.

There is the Internet petition to President Obama protesting a Senate decision to grant illegal immigrants Social Security benefits. (The petition to President Obama is a repurposed version of a comparable petition to President George W. Bush from 2006.)

There is the image showing deplorably low grades and SAT scores on Sarah Palin’s high school report card — a fraud that demonstrates how easily images can be manipulated and falsified.

This proliferation of — let’s be frank about it — lies tells us something about ourselves:

People believe what they want to believe, crediting information that reinforces those beliefs and rejecting information that challenges those beliefs. Many of these beliefs are inextricably intertwined with people’s fears about the world and their place in it. Today’s intense anxieties about economic well-being leave people easily moved to share their fears, with demagogues standing by to exploit them.

If you fear that oppressive government regulations are going to endanger your freedoms and personal security, or that illegal immigrants are a threat to the nation, or that Sarah Palin is dangerously uninformed, you are liable to seize on any report that confirms your suspicions, however ludicrous and unsupported. (Before I go on, am I being clear to you that this is universal, and that the left, the right, and the center are equally credulous?)

And not just in politics. The range of rumors and legends that people are willing to entertain and spread abroad, and which the Mikkelsons explode, is astonishingly wide. Some examples:

Mussolini did not make the trains run on time in Italy.

Mariah Carey did not say, “When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean, I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”

It is not true — I may have readers who will find comfort in this — that a woman older than forty is likelier to be killed by a terrorist than to get married.

It was once thought that the job of journalism was to sort out the true from the false and enable the public to make informed decisions. Rumor and fabrication were left to the supermarket tabloids, so that credulous could be entertained and the informed amused by reports such as “Stroke victim falls in garden & is eaten by her Venus flytraps.”* But in a world in which, for example, Wikipediasts can insist that it doesn’t really matter than some of the information in the “free-content encyclopedia” is not accurate, and journalists can uncritically publish bogus information taken from it, it is not clear how much journalism takes its old responsibility seriously.

If I were designing a journalism curriculum, I would experiment with a course, Skepticism 101, in which the students would have to analyze press releases boasting unsupported claims, polls with unreliable samples, scientific studies with questionable methodology, statistics that don’t add up, rumors, and the other free-floating nonsense that is as much a part of the atmosphere as the polluted air we breathe.



* An actual Weekly World News headline.

I wasn't at Woodstock

Few things in journalism bear as strong a sense of inevitability as the anniversary story. Point a writer to an event, ten, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, or fifty years in the past, and you can lay out the page before the text is in hand — none of those messy contingencies with stories that don’t pan out.

No doubt such articles appeal to a “Hey, I remember that” nostalgia among readers, especially my fellows in the boomer generation, our waistlines expanding as our hairlines recede, as we struggle to see through our trifocals to the golden haze of youth.

But the real reason for the proliferation of anniversary stories is that they are easy.

Very little real reporting is involved; much of the information can be retrieved readily from the archive — rather like the partially masticated rodent tissue that owls deposit in the beaks of their young. Beyond that it is only necessary to round up a few people with a peripheral connection to the event and record their incisive comments: “Like, it was heavy, man.” And because our visual age demands images with stories, the photo archive is just sitting there to be exploited. Nothing could be easier.

I was at The Cincinnati Enquirer for the fifth-anniversary commemoration of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.* The most notable contribution to the literature of anniversaries that year came from one of the suburban papers, which published a first-person account by a reporter who had been in the club when the fire broke out. This “I was there” article recounted how he got out of the building, was told by a police officer to clear out, and got in his car and drove away, listening to the sirens of the approaching fire trucks as he left.

Yes, a newspaper reporter — a newspaper reporter — left the scene of the biggest story of the decade. Then he wrote about leaving the scene with witness-to-history pride. And his newspaper put this account on the front page. Thus does American journalism honor its own.

So when you round up a couple of people whose feebly firing synapses produce some half-coherent account of what went on in the mud at Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969, make the most of it. But I wasn’t there then; I’m not much interested now.




*The fire on May 28, 1977, in Southgate, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, killed 165 people. (You can read The Enquirer’s twenty-year commemoration here.) It was a touchy subject at The Enquirer, because the Courier-Journal of Louisville won a Pulitzer Prize for covering this story in The Enquirer’s back yard. The Enquirer attempted to compensate by producing an interminable series on aluminum wiring, which was determined to be the cause of the fire. This series was undoubtedly submitted to the Pulitzer judges, who promptly rolled over and went back to sleep, but it did produce a bon mot from a copy desk colleague: “This is the only paper I’ve ever worked for that had a wire editor and an aluminum wire editor.”

Evaluating copy editors

If you happen to oversee copy editors, one of our nation’s fast-dwindling resources, you might be interested in some suggestions on how to evaluate their performance. If you are a civilian, unclear what copy editors do, apart from filing for unemployment insurance, this post will suggest to you what is being sacrificed at the publications you read.

These standards for evaluation are based on materials I used as head of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. The most effective evaluations are thoughtful and detailed commentary on the copy editor’s work, laced with examples of solid work and work that could stand improvement, written in English. (I was once supplied with a little book of catch phrases to use in performance reviews; it goes against the grain for me to have a book pulped, but exceptions must sometimes be made.) You are welcome to assign percentage values to each category, or a 1-5-weak-to-strong ranking, if you prefer for your performance reviews to display a spurious mathematical exactitude.


THE SELF-REVIEW

If the copy editor takes a self-review seriously, instead of shying away from it as a document of self-incrimination, it can afford useful reflection. It does not have to be complex; consideration of four basic questions is adequate.

1. What strengths can I point to in my work?

2. In what areas do I need to make improvement?

3. What obstacles hamper me from doing better work?

4. What training would help me achieve better work?

(In Question 3, the copy editor might well consider personal matters as well as workplace circumstances.)



THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW: COPY EDITOR


1. Knowledge of work

Identification and correction of errors of fact.

Identification and correction of errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and English usage.

Appropriate application of house style to texts.

Success in writing headlines that are accurate, which appropriately convey the tone and nature of articles, and which engage readers’ interest.

Mastery of the editing software.


2. Work judgments

Successful pacing — the ability to size up quickly the editing issues in a text and to deal with them appropriately while meeting deadlines.

Productivity — completion of an appropriate volume of work during the shift.

Successful revision of texts to achieve greater clarity, without introducing errors.

Ability to explain and justify editing changes.

Identification of flaws in focus, structure, organization, and tone in texts, with suitable recommendations for their correction.

Identification of potential ethical or legal issues, including libel, falsification, and plagiarism.

Overall quality of the copy editor’s work.


3. Collaboration

Ability to deal collegially and tactfully with authors, identifying and resolving issues in good time without acrimony.

Ability to maintain good relationships with assigning editors while dealing with editing issues in their writers’ work.

Ability to deal collegially with fellow copy editors, coordinating activities with a minimum of friction.



4. Intangibles

Ability to concentrate and disregard distractions.

Effectiveness under stress.

Willingness to accept change in routines and duties.

Display of initiative — taking necessary action instead of waiting to be instructed.

Receptivity to advice and instruction.

Willingness to take responsibility for the quality of work.



THE PERFORMANCE REVIEW: SUPERVISOR

Effectiveness in planning and organizing the work of the desk to ensure productivity and appropriate quality of work.

Efficiency in scheduling to ensure that the level of staffing and the volume of work match, day to day.

Skill in testing, interviewing, and evaluating applicants.

Success in training new employees and providing any necessary additional training for experienced editors.

Willingness to help subordinates prepare themselves for promotion, placing them in situations where their abilities can be noticed.

Management of budget to contain expenses and provide adequate resources.

Insight and fairness in evaluating employees.

Readiness to undertake appropriate disciplinary action.

Sound judgment and good decisions.

Openness to innovation.

Readiness to accept responsibility.

Willingness to share the burden of the work alongside subordinates.

You too can be Montesquieu

Waiting at the Evergreen coffee house on Cold Spring Lane for a friend to arrive, I picked up from the discarded books available on the shelves a copy of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Leafing through it, I came across a passage describing the behavior of the French that I thought well summed up today’s traffic on Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones:

They are always in a hurry, because theirs is the important business of asking everyone they meet where they are going and from where they have come.

This literary device putting a foreign observer in one’s own culture and recording his naive perspective is a well-used device in satire. In another 18th-century instance, Voltaire’s “The Huron,” a Native American is brought to France, converts to Christianity, and proceeds to take the New Testament seriously. Hilarity ensues.

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop takes a humble nature writer from the country an turns him into a foreign correspondent for The Daily Beast, opening up the lunacies of Fleet Street in what is still the funniest newspaper novel.

Now I am about to go off for two days to visit a retired colleague and his wife in the country. (Just in time, too, because if I have to read any more crack-brained theories or outright lies about health care legislation, I might apply to be euthanized myself.) During this interval, why don’t you put fingers to keyboard and bring an innocent outsider onto the domestic scene and record what he or she discovers? Particularly about journalism. On my return, I’ll publish here anything that’s not libelous or obscene. Write a paragraph; write a page. Don’t worry that you can’t outdo Waugh; only reality can accomplish that.