2009 AP Stylebook

The 2009 AP Stylebook is now available for $18.95 each plus shipping ($11.75 for members).

The online stylebook is available for $25 for a year, and if you can swing that -- not so much the cost but whether you have the access and online is more convenient -- I recommend it. The online version now has audio files for pronunciation, and it includes regularly updated profile sheets on major businesses (revenue, market cap, etc.).

If you are an academic, AP now offers a chance to get a desk copy. Please do so, if you can. There really are enough changes each year that you shouldn't be using a two-year-old copy.

Alas, the AP has now put most of its "Ask the Editor" feature -- the archives -- behind the online stylebook paywall so that only a few of the most recent questions show. That cuts off what had become a de facto free stylebook for many people. Makes some sense, though, if you're trying to make money off the thing (plus, I can't begin to imagine the time sink that must have been for staff, especially the repetitive questions).

The "Stylebook" also now has a Twitter account, though AP isn't answering style questions there. But you can air your tech gripes and, I gather, for now get an occasional chance to win a stylebook.

Internet Writing Syllabus

I had not seen this till a friend showed it to me today -- Robert Lanham's "Internet-age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview."

It has such nuggets as:

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

Evaluation: Students will be graded on the RBBEAW* system, developed to assess and score students based on their own relative merit.

A+ = 100–90
A = 89–80
A- = 79–70
A-- = 69–60
A--- = 59–50
A---- = 49–0

Instructor: Robert Lanham, star of the vblog series Writer's Block: Embrace It—Stop Wasting Time and Live!

- - - -

* Raised by Boomers, Everyone's a Winner

Enjoy, even though those may be tears mixed in with the laughs.

Books worth noting (one free)

John McIntyre notes on his blog that you should rush over to Grant Barrett's "The Lexicographer's Rules," where he has made a free PDF download of his book The Official Dictonary of Unofficial English available.

John also points out a new book by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman that, as he says, "you ought to keep in mind if you are serious about writing and editing": Origin of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.

As John writes:

They advise that it’s time to give up the struggle over gauntlet and gantlet, data as a singular, decimate as strictly meaning a tenth (though not as equivalent of destroyed), beg the question as solely a term of logic, hopefully as a sentence adverb, bemused as meaning only muddled or confused. I share their regret over the last count, but, you know, it is more important to be understood than to be correct.

Like John, I share the regret over bemused and, in addition, over beg the question. I think they still have some use, and there are good alternatives. But I certainly agree with the others. I've argued that AP needs to re-examine gantlet and gauntlet because two of the three major dictionaries, M-W and American Heritage, already accept gauntlet as the main noun. It's only Webster's New World 4, the most conservative of the dictionaries, that clings to the distinction. Now, that's the dictionary AP uses, but there are times to throw in the towel. (The AP also should re-examine the stanch/staunch pair. Again, I say this regretfully, but look and you'll find staunch clearly listed as a verb in the major references.)

Anyhow, I'll be ordering my copy from Amazon tonight.

Online College

Normally, I don't do a lot of link exchanging or guest posting here because most of the entreaties are marginally relevant.

However, Nicole White did outpoint her Online College site, and I think it's worth taking a look at. She recently posted "Skip Journalism School: 50 Free Open Courses."

Not that I recommend skipping j-school mind you (ha!), but whether you are in school or in the field and wanting to brush up, there are some good links here. Many are from the MIT open course site. You can pooh-pooh that if you want, but remember, MIT's advanced communications lab has been on the forefront of a lot of the developments now roiling your media life.

Dan Conover's vision of news

Conover has taken his previously noted "2020 vision" and combined it with a follow-up "The lack of vision thing," into a long but thought-stimulating post for AEJMC's "2020 vision" project looking at the future of news.

I think he's hit on something here:

My first reporting job wasn’t for a newspaper, but for NATO. My armored cavalry troop drove jeeps along the borders of East Germany and Czechoslovakia and watched for activity on the other side of the fences. When we spotted something interesting, we recorded it in a highly structured way that could be accurately and quickly communicated over a two-way radio, to be transcribed by specialists at our border camp and relayed to intelligence analysts in Brussells.

Since the audience for this reporting was comprised entirely of intelligence experts, and since the ultimate value of such trivia is its ability to be stored in ways that might eventually indicate a pattern, my ability to communicate information accurately and quickly was prized. My ability as a storyteller? Utterly insignificant.

A print journalist is supposed to do both things well, but truth be told, if you can’t tell a good story in a compelling way, your print-reporting career is toast. Weak reporter? We’ll coach-you-up. Fundamentally clueless as a writer? Consider another line of work.

Journalism is a profession for storytellers, and our newsroom culture celebrates romantic myths that are generally hostile to structure. We enjoy jockeying with authority, poking bureaucrats and annoying anal-retentive city editors. Few journalists are good with numbers, and we don’t see that as a weakness. It’s all part of a rebellious “ink-stained wretch” identity that hasn’t reflected reality in at least a generation, if in fact it ever did.

As I said, worth reading and thinking about.

'Stimulus' + 'hands' = bad mojo

OK, there are some words and word pairs that when you are on a newspaper desk you just always pay attention to, especially in headlines.

"Probe" is one of them where the odds that things will turn out badly are high.

"Stimulus" is another. And "hands" is one of those words you always want to be worried about if it comes anywhere within viewing range of "stimulus."

(Yeah, you can say I have the mind of a 14-year-old, but there are a lot of folks out there with the same thoughts. Now, maybe you want people to snicker when they read your stories. Good times all. Me, I'd prefer to keep the yucks to the stories where I'm trying to generate yucks.)

So ponder this headline from a weekend paper (and keeping in mind that people do skip the small type, things like headers and decks):


Hmmmm ....

Maybe a rewrite like this, just to triage? (It is a bit ambiguous - is the court having the dispute?) But I'll take it over the first. Your thoughts?

Stimulus
dispute
at state's
top court

How online changes the AP style game

Just something to consider from Robert Niles discussing how to search engine optimize your site:

Keyword repetition and density on the page still play a role in where you end up in the SERPs (though not nearly as much as in the pre-Google era.) You can help yourself, therefore, by moving away from rigid AP style rules on second references and place names to more SEO-friendly use of full names on some (but not all) subsequent references within a story.


So I find myself coming back to the average college student I teach who has been brought up in an elementary and high school system that, more than likely, encourages rules, standardized testing and the like. Those students struggle enough trying to navigate the "often you do, but sometimes you don't" vagaries of current news styles.

Niles is correct in his suggestion, but I can hardly wait for the fun.

The old "hairdryer treatment"

Over at World Wide Words, Michael Quinion has a wonderful explanation of a delightful Britishism -- "hairdryer treatment" -- that would seem to have widespread utility these days.

The term arises from soccer and the rather forceful, in-your-face bellowing reprimands from a coach to a player. But as Quinion notes, the term has its uses in the workplace as well. Given the stress in newsrooms these days, it might be a handy term to have in the verbal larder.

So what is journalism's value?

Over on BNET, Erik Sherman has a retort to Robert Picard's Christian Science Monitor article earlier this week, Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.

In Why Readers Deserve No Journalism, Sherman adopts the "we're going to take our ball and walk away if you don't play (or pay) nice" stance. He's joined by several "woe is me" commenters who fall back on the canard that if we just go where the money is, journalism goes to hell.

Sherman falls prey to the same kinds of inaccuracies he accuses Picard of.

The key here is not absolute value, but perceived value - it's, after all, why an American Idol-winning singer gets multimillions, etc. I read Picard as arguing that journalists are not perceived to have skills particularly distinctive or specialized (and Sherman's rebuttal of Picard's example of electricians is off-base -- electricians have to be licensed, which, ipso facto, means society values their skills with enforced scarcity).

The problem really isn't so much commodity news as it is that when there is economic value it is so fleeting as to be uncapturable. Consider, the first bulletins and stories on 9/11 were practically priceless if you were anywhere near ground zero (or about anywhere, for that matter). But after five minutes, their value had dropped to pretty much zero. That is the underlying conundrum with much "news."

Can we produce journalism that has lasting value? I don't know whether we can produce enough of it or if the ROI on such stories makes them doable -- and at the same time produces enough margin to make it possible to do the things that many journalists argue the public really needs and wants but doesn't know it yet.

Which then brings us to the social benefits/costs. But those, of course, are rarely quantifiable, which is why we have government rules and regs to make businesses et al. effectively absorb them or the public pay for them. (It's really the raison d'etre of government, isn't it?) But that gets into a sticky wicket with journalism, doesn't it?

In a way, Sherman round about comes to the same conclusion as Picard -- that unless journalists can find a way to produce things with intrinsic or perceived value -- and value that can be captured -- then things deteriorate. Picard attacks it from the angle of better content. Sherman attacks it from trying to create a scarcity, which is really what media was based on for most of the 20th century.

Problem is, I think his suggestion will leave most people just yawning. Most people use news media primarily for surveillance. They don't need that much of it.

Or, sure, take your ball and go home. Just be careful what you wish for.

----

Update: Brandon Keim has an annotated critique of Picard's article. Aside from the occasional snark, it raises some good debatable points. But ultimately it seems to boil down to two points

• Journalism is a victim of rampant fecklessness by the public which just doesn't seem to give a fig about the valuable work journalists due, accelerated by the infernal Internet.
• The value of journalism is so great to society that some price should be exacted.

The last is encapsulated in his comment: Journalism’s benefits produce just as much value as ever. What’s changed is the price people pay for them.

And that's what too many journalists do not seem to understand - people never actually paid for the journalism. If they had, we could have been out selling our work individually on the streets (why have a middleman?). They paid for the aggregation, the convenience and the filtering function -- yes, the packaging, as much as anything .

Journalists needed the middleman. So did consumers. It was a nice symbiotic model. But consumers no longer need it so much. The business only works so long as both sides of the equation are in equilibrium.

I'm not debating that journalism has value. In that, I think Picard is a little narrow in defining its value as merely functional. There is a social value. But functional, social or otherwise, the main point is that it is almost impossible to capture given our current technological, economic and legal framework.

Now that Keim has had his shot at Picard, I'd like to see him take on the challenge of how to capture that social value.

Proud poppa-in-law moment

I don't know why I keep forgetting to put this up, but we break our regular programming for a proud father-in-law moment.

This story from Little Rock features my daughter-in-law, who works helping the homeless and others.

Her blog.

We now resume regular programming.

Journalism education: A four-part framework

I normally don't post by monthly Common Sense Journalism columns here (I figure you can follow the link on the right if you want them, and since they are in several online pubs, they get exposure there). But since so many of us are struggling with how to refashion j-education (not to mention journalism itself), I think this month's column might have some extra merit. So here goes:

Common Sense Journalism

By Doug Fisher

Reassessing J-school – and your newsroom

As most of journalism and journalism education is doing, at the University of South Carolina we are reassessing what we do and how we do it.

As demand grows for multiskilled journalists, like many newsrooms we are pushing against limited resources. In our case, that includes the number of course hours allowed by accreditation.

We are questioning what we do down to its basic foundations, much as many newsrooms are doing.

However, it can take months, sometimes years, to change a university curriculum, so it’s important to have some framework to guide the process.

To do that, I‘ve proposed four broad areas: acquiring information, analyzing and interpreting information, presenting information and finding an audience.

This isn’t just academic, however. It can be useful in assessing your newsroom. We discovered, for instance, that we put a lot of effort into showing students how to present information, but perhaps not enough into acquiring and analyzing it and very little into helping these young journalists understand the audience.

Let’s look at some things you might think about.

Acquiring Information
We quickly listed interviewing and critical listening as some of journalism’s most important skills. But too few of us are born with these and have to learn them. We don’t teach them as well as we could. What do you do in your newsroom to help your staff improve these critical skills?

In the digital age, developing sources and monitoring the information environment have become more complicated and more critical with e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, online databases, RSS feeds, data mining and search engines far beyond Google and Yahoo. Do you give your staff the tools and training to use these effectively? Do you encourage use of social networking but monitor to make sure it does not substitute for real in-person contact?

Analyzing and interpreting information
This is the journalist’s bread and butter. Quantitative literacy, civic literacy, business literacy, understanding news values and detecting plain old tripe all fall in this area.

But the digital tools available to help such analysis, from spreadsheets to social mapping, have exploded. Are you encouraging your staff to use any of them? Are you helping them learn how?

Presenting information
Writing has always been the core of journalism. And presentation has been hot with the explosion of multimedia journalism.

We can still learn a lot here – for instance, many news organizations don’t effectively use links online. But when we looked closely, we wondered if maybe we were putting too much emphasis on presentation, especially with all the new digital tools, and neglecting the other important aspects of journalism.

Are you doing that too?

Finding an audience
If we have learned nothing else in recent years, it’s that to ignore the audience is to endanger the journalism.

Gut instinct is not enough when your audience can be gone in a click. Effective journalists need to know something about civic engagement, social media and managing user-contributed content, and maybe even a little about freelancing.

In your newsroom, is everyone involved – from the reporter to the desk to the online producer to the person who may have to sell that content in print and online? Can you do it without creating ethical problems?

It’s a challenge, but a necessary one because we no longer can simply dip into a river of revenue. Now it’s about aggregating revenue streams, even rivulets, and meeting people on their turf, not ours.

You might ask where we put things like law, ethics and history? We’ll still have courses on those, but we’ve also concluded that, just like in a newsroom, they must be part of everything we do.

We’re still trying to figure this all out, and you likely are too. But maybe this framework will help.

More fascinating reading

No, not about journalism, but about cities as "living organisms" and how uncannily the mathematics that help explain an urban area (Zipf's law applied) also seem to have a parallel in zoology.

Aside from journalism, one of my other nerdish tendencies is a love of cities, transportation, urban planning and urban affairs (guess it comes from growing up on subways and buses).

So I found mathematician Steven Strogatz's "Math and the City" column in the N.Y. Times fascinating. Maybe you will, too.

(Zipf's law, transformed into the Pereto power curve, of course, also rears its head all over the Internet.)

Wednesday roundup

So many good things to chew on today: Journalism's value and journalists' pay, the raison d'etre of copy editors and the never-ending debate over style, usage, language and just the general idea of getting it right.

::::::::::
For starters, read Robert Picard's column in the Christian Science Monitor, "Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay."

Picard is simply one of the best, if not the flashiest, thinkers in the arena of journalism, media and the economics of it all. He says more elegantly what I have repeatedly argued here - journalism as we now commonly practice it has little to no economic value, or the value is so fleeting that to capture it is not feasible.

Of course, he says it better:

Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others. In this process three fundamental functions and related skills have historically created economic value: Accessing sources, determining significance of information, and conveying it effectively. ...

To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay.

::::::::::

So, then, what is the value of copy editing? Copy editors, of course, have suddenly discovered that they are not indispensable, as they once may have thought. In fact, again as argued here many times (use the "copy editing" tag to see many of the posts), to most managers they are a cost, not a benefit.

In "Copy Editing: Who are we anyway?" David Sullivan produces one of his usual perceptive posts that acknowledges all facets of the issue - not just the quality argument, but the reality that too many copy editors have done little to promote themselves or their craft:

It strikes me that one of the problems copy editors have is that at too many papers, their jobs consist of: Whatever no one else wants to do.

The majority of copy editors I have known combine a high level of skill, a perfectionistic streak, an incredible work ethic, and a combination of shyness and a sense that "if I can just keep my head down, maybe they won't give me even more to do." But as surveys have shown, such as the one that led to the founding of ACES more than a decade ago, copy editors are often the most alienated people in the newsroom -- not the most negative, not the most critical, but the ones most detached from what is going on elsewhere. In part that is their job -- to look at things with a fresh eye. In part that is the hours at a morning paper, which separate them from most of the reporters and top editors.

Sullivan has a good prescription:

Go to the top editor in your newsroom and say: I'd like to talk to you about what you see copy editors' role as. Don't start off talking about staffing levels and page throughputs and all the "production" stuff we do. Most top editors are bored stiff by "production." So talk to them about what they see the job of a copy editor as a journalist.

I'd quibble with him on only one thing: As said here before, yes, you need to try to get editors and other managers to understand what you do, but if you want to quantify your worth (and in the current business climate, you MUST quantify your worth), the real people you want to get to are the libel insurers. If they think their risk increases because there are fewer copy editors or because they are not being used properly, they'll quantify that by raising the rates.

Maybe the leadership of the American Copy Editors Society is moving on that front. If so, it's very quiet. So far, I'm not sure they've gotten that message.

::::::::::
Sullivan's ruminations can be contrasted with those of Penelope Trunk in "Good grammar might derail your career" and the earlier "Writing without typos is totally outdated."

Trunk's posts are fine exhibits of the postmodern debate between grammar as snobbery and grammar as communications skill.

Most grammar rules don’t matter, though. That is, if you get them wrong, the reader still can find the meaning. For example, few people know when to use effect and when to use affect. But it doesn’t matter because the first is a noun and the second is a verb so the likelihood you'll mistake the meaning of a sentence because of a grammar error in this case is extremely low.

Here’s another example: Find me a sentence with the wrong version of it’s that you can’t understand due to the error. Wait. No. Forget it. Because you can’t. So a lot of grammar does not clarify meaning, it just serves to show you are good at grammar.

There are a couple of logic holes here. First, she confounds, as do many people, grammar with style, usage, spelling and punctuation -- they are not the same thing. Grammar is the way words go together to create meaning (actually, you can say symbols, not just words, because there is such a thing as visual grammar). The other stuff is there to help the process along or shape it in whatever way the predominant dialect that you are using supports.

Second, she is using only one real frame for her argument - that of more informal communication. As many of those commenting point out, writing occurs across may spheres - some more formal than others. Trunk complains, for instance, that as an English major she had been published in literary journals, but had to learn the AP Stylebook to manage a Fortune 500 company's Web site.

Yep, shur 'nuf. When communicating in business, where that communication may be seen by many different audiences and stakeholders, consistency in meaning and application are not just important, but critical. Just ask Rogers Communications, for which a misplaced comma cost the company $1 million (CAN). That's why business (and journalism) use the predominant -- and I will concede, hegemonic -- conventions of "standard written English." Layered on top of that is whatever style the organization wants to adopt.

Good writers (and editors) know when and how to break the "rules" and for what audiences. By and large, those commenting on Trunk's post seem to understand that. Hers would be lots more useful if she put her energies into delving into that.

:::::

And while you are at it, tool over to Alan Mutter's Newsosaur blog and read the guest post by David Boraks, proprietor of the DavidsonNews.net site. A good look into a startup doing hyperlocal journalism.

Congrats to the Carolina Reporter

The Reporter, the modest little effort to come out of our practicum here at the University of South Carolina J-school, was a "national finalist" as best all-around non-daily student newspaper in SPJ's Mark of Excellence contest.

Congrats to the staffs - spring and fall 2008 - who deserve the honor.

Best All-Around Non-Daily Student Newspaper
(published less than 4 times per week)
• National Winner: Staff, Loyola Phoenix, Loyola University
• National Finalist: Staff, The Sentinel, North Idaho College
• National Finalist: Staff, The Carolina Reporter, University of South Carolina

Newspapers' digital archives pose ethical challenges

Interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education (free area) this week on how college alumni, including former student journalists are trying to rewrite history by asking that embarrassing material -- including stories they have written -- be taken down from college publication Web sites.

So time for a little self-promotion here.

Larry Timbs, Will Atkinson and I did some of the first exploration two years ago into the ethical and operational issues raised by newspaper Web sites and the digitization of newspaper archives. We asked newspaper editors a wide range of questions, including some relating to four possible situations in which someone might ask that their picture or a story naming them be taken down.

You can find How America's newspapers handle (or don't handle) their 'digital attics': An investigation into ethical, legal and privacy issues emerging from publications' Web archives at the Grassroots Editor Web site. (The paper was presented at the 13th Newspapers and Community Building symposium.)

If you want the direct link to the PDF, here it is.

Our man in Africa

Paul Bowers, a University of South Carolina sophomore who won the contest to travel with Nicholas Kristof to Africa, has begun his blog posts. They are two good ones, if you ask me:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/pauls-1st-post-tiny-fighters-in-dakar/
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/win-a-trip-first-impressions-first-surprises/

I think it's worth looking at the comments on the first of those, however, because there is some good leavening there - a warning that too often Americans cover Africa from the predetermined frames of poverty, famine, etc. As one commentor says, it's important to move beyond those frames if you hope to tell the full story - just as it is here at home.

Obviously, we here at USC are proud that Bowers won this trip. Here's the RSS feed if you want to follow it some more.

Update
Bowers also is featured in some NYT videos:
Children's health
With Kristoff in Sierra Leone
Saving West African Moms

Trib Modules

In case you missed it in the past couple of weeks, all the carnage at the Tribune papers' desks appears traceable back to the modules the Trib is starting to roll out among all its papers.

PDFs of national, international and business pages have started rolling out of Chicago. In a bit of irony, as one memo notes, after all the redesign work done at some of the Trib papers to establish their local identity, they're being forced to run Trib typefaces.

Not surprising, all this. Members of the Suburban Newspaper Association returned from a trip to Scandanavia last year all a ga-ga over template-driven editing, also known as "layout-driven editing."(Here's more from a Canadian Newspaper Association story, and you can request a copy of the SNA report for free.)

Most interesting from that memo:

Templated newspaper -- Rather than the current, standard arrangement whereby the ad folks sell as many ads as they can and we fill in the newshole that's left, the paper is going to have a set ad layout depending on the day of the week, so in theory we would be able to plan a paper days or weeks ahead knowing exactly what it is going to look like.

Anyone told the ad boys and girls yet? Seems like that's a potentially serious crimp in their income.

Lest you be surprised, this has been evolving for more than a decade. There's a reason all those 10 a.m. editorial meetings started in the 1980 and '90s. It's called preplanning a much as possible. Accounting hates breaking news.

From Steve Yelvington at Morris: Read my lips: This is not a temporary maneuver in response to an economic cycle. This is permanent structural change.

It's come to this?

Atlanta Journal Constitution hires digital ad agency to suggest to folks maybe they should try print instead of online, Adweek reports.

If you were wondering who would replace newspapers

Then read this article from Broadcasting & Cable: Stations Search for Gold In a Post-Newspaper Landscape.

An excerpt:

Few could have predicted how swiftly newspapers would go from being an integral part of people's daily routines to tottering toward obsolescence. As major markets such as Seattle and Denver have said goodbye to well-established dailies, and the likes of San Francisco and Boston ponder a future without papers that are almost as much a part of the regional landscape as the Golden Gate Bridge and Fenway Park, local television executives are studying what new prospects await them in a paper-free world. There's lucrative opportunity to reach out to former newspaper advertisers and, perhaps even more significant, there's a chance to become a more trusted source of local news.

“Where there's a void, a well-branded TV station will fill in as a news source,” says Hearst-Argyle VP of News Brian Bracco. “We have tremendous brand loyalty, and have to follow up and make sure we're covering news the way we should in our communities.”

However, also a sobering excerpt:

Yet it appears unlikely that many stations will assume much of the in-depth enterprise reporting that has long defined newspapers. Most general managers say they're already filling that role adequately, suggesting that longform reportage in the community may disappear or be relegated to obscure Websites. “We've tried to do [strong investigative] all along,” says KOMO Seattle VP/General Manager Jim Clayton, who employs a three-person I-team. “I don't know that we'd do more of it with the Post-Intelligencer [now Web-only].”

Of course, TV's idea of long form too often is 2 minutes instead of 1:15 on the latest sweeps topic of the season. Sigh.

Fear and loathing of ....

Young people.

Yes, there is a term for it, and Michael Quinion discourses about it in this week's missive from World Wide Words. (If you don't get the e-mail or feed version, there's a week's delay in its being on the Web site.)

Ephebiphobia

As Quninion notes, the word derives from the classical Greek "ephebe," a man 18 to 20 who undertook military service.

I mention it only because of the epithets being hurled in some journalism circles these days toward the digital generation, often tinged with the backstory that somehow this generation (though when used in this context, it tends to take on an "everyone under 30" color) should be hanged for the troubles of traditional newsrooms. (Alas, trad news practices are, as noted here before, merely collateral damage of a shift that is affecting nearly all middlemen; it is not all a plot against journalists.)

I just thought it would be nice for those folks to have a word for it.