Journalists turn to social media sites for stories

A survey by Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University finds journalists, especially those at online sites, turning increasingly to social media sites for story ideas. That includes blogs.

MediaPost story.

Survey results.

It's time for the AP to listen

Daniel Hunt has penned an open letter on the American Copy Editors Society site to AP and its numerous style changes.

I don't get quite so lathered up about it (explanation follows), but I will repeat what I have said many times -- AP needs to start listening more formally to editors and desks. I'm hoping the appearance of the stylebook editors at the upcoming Philadelphia conference is a good first step.

Anyhow, my reaction to Daniel's open letter (that I also posted there):

While I have long agitated for AP to get together a users' panel, I simply can't get so agitated at these things. I think it's AP trying to respond to an era that has become so pell-mell that some order is needed and much quicker than yearly. I don't have a problem with "Great Recession," but then having spent 18 years with the AP, I may read the book a little differently. I see AP saying that, OK, if you must use it, cap it and here's the period covered. As Teresa notes, however, feel free not to use it. And the food, well, food has become so much of our modern media culture that I'm willing to give AP a pass there, too. But I agree with Luke, too. [Luke Morris' comment that AP needs to deal with things like "Web site."] There are much more substantive issues AP needs to address in discussions with editors - things like Web site/website, under way/underway, work force/workforce, gantlet/gauntlet, over/more than and a host of other usage issues that have tilted against AP. Those probably should be a yearly thing because they get to long-held practices and shibboloeths (think of the ill-conceived and thankfully short-lived change to bifurcate some ages between figures and spelled out). But AP needs to get some feedback channel, and ACES would be the best way.

Happy Presidents ... er ... Washington's Birthday

Intrepid American Copy Editors Society member and San Antonio copy desk stalwart Dan Puckett reminded us on the ACES discussion board that today is really Washington's Birthday, if you want to be correct as to the federal holiday.

His explanation from a few years ago.

The AP weighs in on it, too:

Presidents Day: Not adopted by the federal government as the official name of the Washington's Birthday holiday. However, some federal agencies, states and local governments use the term.

So pick your stance: Accurate or ecumenical -- or, depending on where you live, perhaps both.

Congrats to Deirdre Edgar

Been meaning to post a congrats to fellow American Copy Editors Society member Deirdre Edgar, with whom I've had the pleasure of working with as a presenter at several ACES conferences.

Edgar was named the new readers' representative at the L.A. Times last month. (A Q and A on Andy Bechtel's blog reminded me how slothful I'd been on that.)

I did get a kick out of one of her early posts -- how the Times is dropping the use of "today" because who knows when you'll read this in the Internet age. How wire service of them (ha!).

Good luck, Deirdre.

Copy desk consolidation chronicles

The massive consolidations of copy desks continues.

The latest, from L.A. Observed, is that deskers at Scripps' Ventura County Star have been told the desk functions are moving to Corpus Christi, Texas.

Earlier we had: Media General rumors confirmed.

It's going to continue as long as copy editors allow their jobs to be defined as more mechanical, get-the-paper-out-the-door skills. Those parts can and probably should be consolidated. But that's manufacturing.

If you want to talk quality, that's a whole different area - and as I've said before, the only ones going to make that case for copy editors in a language the corporate types will understand are the libel insurers. The insurers are the ones that quantify and price risk. Otherwise, it's all just a cost of doing buisness to your local publisher.

For when you get that Irish pub Jones

Now here's a Web site we can all get behind: http://www.irishbeerfinder.com/

Bad Heds: Did he actually want to be there

The poorly worded headline of the week, so far, comes from the U.K.'s Press Association. One wonders, was he sad he missed it?

But this one from Ad Age, brought to our attention by a commenter to this blog's feed on Facebook, comes in a close second:

Danger: Journalists reporting science/engineering

Well, the problem here may be that there was no reporting. So complains Daniel Grossman in an e-mail and at his blog. And he's right. CNN, especially, went a little ga ga over this diamond-shaped airship concept from design firm Seymourpowell (beware, the site is entirely in Flash), which ever so helpfully provided high-res images on its Web site for folks to grab.



A look at the CNN story shows how much outside reporting -- aside from talking to someone at Seymourpowell? Lets' see. Oh. ... None. But there are some really sweeeeeet images.

Not to fear. Grossman slices, dices and dissects what he calls a nice piece of "journalism fail." I'd tend to agree.

Look, I have no problem reporting this stuff - people should see where advanced minds are thinking of going, and I did many such stories myself. But it needs leavening. Maybe parts of this are actually stuff we might see in the future. But it takes reporting to figure that out.

First thing we'll do is kill all the obit traffic ...

OK, it might not be as prosaic as kill all the lawyers, but I was struck by Paid Content's report that one of Journalism Online's first clients to go public, the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, planned as one of it first tests to put its obits behind at least a partial paywall: In Lancaster, publisher Steinman Enterprises will charge readers outside the circulation area for access to obits, starting with a certain number free and then requiring a fee.

It's an interesting move, since obits are one of the most popular landing points at many smaller papers. But I'm not sure they are one of the most monetizable, at least not this way.

I don't know how many you'll get free, so it may not make a lot of difference (unless you are some kind of serial mourner or have some very large - and aging - family). But I have argued here before that the best way to make money off the out-of-towners would seem to me to be advertising from those who cater to the mourners. Using the Salon model, have them watch a 10-second ad for the florist and then have that morph into an "order here" button. Get the premium for pay per click.

It seems to me there are other alternatives for getting obituary information. Put up a pay firewall, and are you actually losing potential, premium income?

What do readers really want from papers (and copy editors?

David Sullivan, in one of his usually well-done essays at "That the Press, Baby," has a well-considered and thoughtful answer to that question:

So I have to admit that the most important function of what I do is not the stuff I most enjoy doing -- the "honing" of stories, the subtle word choices, the playing with nuance, the oh-so-clever headlines. If people are interested in a story and believe it, they'll read it even if it's lazily written. What's most important about my job is to look at a story and say -- is the typical person going to find anything wrong with this story? ...

Newspapers dispense with that at their peril. As McGuire and others have noted, the laugher in the Minneapolis cutbacks was not the laying off of vast numbers of copy editors; that was a personal tragedy for a bunch of good folks. It was the belief -- which even the editors' note showed little faith in -- that somehow, spellcheck and reporters reading their own stories and the like were going to take care of the problem this layoff created. If that were the case, newspapers would never have hired copy editors in the first place.

Do take a few minutes to read it and ponder what he says.