Congrats John McIntyre

Yesterday was my birthday. And the best birthday present of all? Word that John McIntyre is rejoining the staff of the Baltimore Sun.

Congrats!

I am hoping his terms of employment include his ability to keep blogging on language.

(It was so great to see John again at the ACES convention in Philly.)

As seen in the paper ...

From our campus daily newspaper on a column telling braggers to learn humility:

"Those who advertize accomplishments appear conceited, alienate peers"

Well, no need to worry about that if you're "advertizing" things. If you were advertising them, on the other hand ...

ACES, Phoenix and the law

There is a fascinating discussion going on on Facebook about next year's American Copy Editors Society conference in Phoenix -- should ACES go there in light of Arizona's new law trying to corral illegal immigrants?

Marcus Chamberland made the suggestion that ACES look elsewhere. ACES, frankly, can't afford to do that, but I imagine the pressure will be on groups to start pulling out.

Here's the reply by outgoing ACES President Chris Weinandt to the request:

I could give you the politically acceptable answer, but I’ll give you the practical answer. The fact is, ACES isn’t a political organization, and although I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the board members find this decision abhorrent, changing conference locations isn’t in the cards.

Frankly, we can’t afford to go anywhere else at this point. We’ve got a hotel contract that would cost us a bundle to cancel right now. Given how much we’ve lost on the past couple conferences, we just flat can’t afford to do this if we want the organization to survive. We've also got enthusiastic support from ASU. I'm not ready to let those folks down.

And this is just me, but I’d prefer that the organization survive. This is me, too: I think this is a horrendously inhumane law. I've got a list of pejoratives to apply to the Legislature that's as long as anybody's.

But ACES is about spreading the copy editing message throughout the land, and I don’t think the bonehead actions of the Arizona Legislature should deter us from that.

Media General Consolidation - a bit more detail

Media General confirmed last week that it would consolidate editing at Richmond and Tampa, leaving Winston-Salem the odd man out.

Here are a few more details I've picked up:

• Apparently the decision on Tampa reversed course. MG originally feared it could be vulnerable to hurricanes, but there was heavy lobbying, and MG had made investments in Tampa and Richmond that it had not made in Winston-Salem.
• The 21 Winston-Salem staffers get a chance to move. Those who don't will get severance, and those who do move will get relocation.
• Media General will roll out CCI among all three papers (it's the system the Tampa Trib now uses). The transition should be done by August.
• The consolidated desks will be treated as a separate content division, with the managing editor reporting to Donna Reed,  vice president of content.

(Note: Working on consolidated desks and the problems associated with juggling the needs and egos of so many papers came up during my Friday panel at ACES2010. I suggested this would be a good panel for next year at Phoenix, and from Tweets and talking to people, I hear the recruiting of panel members already is going on. This is going to be a major focus next year. By that time, all the major chains and AP will have gone to editing hubs.)

ACES2010 - teaching idea and educator award random thought

Best teaching idea I heard all week comes from William Hickman of Central Oklahoma. He uses episodes of the original "Law and Order" to teach writing and editing.

And if you think about it it, they are structured perfectly for this: First part is a crime story. Second part is a story about the investigation. Third part is the prosecution. Brilliant! I hope he writes it up for a GIFT (Great Idas for Teaching) entry at AEJMC (the big j-profs gathering).

A random thought I had while seeing all my fellow profs and listening to discussions of research and j-education: ACES might consider creating an editing educator award to go along with its Robinson and Aubespin prizes. The award would be for the educator/reseacher doing outstanding teaching or research to preserve and advance copy editing. With all the great research Susan Keith or Leslie Thornton have done in this area, one of them would be my first nominee.

How about it educators? If everyone tossed in $100 apiece for each of the next couple of years we could produce a fund big enough to kick off a few hundred dollars as a prize. And ACES, whatcha think?

AP Style - AP confirms "website," but holds off on state names

Updated to clarify Canadian provinces also remain and the wrack/rack distinction remains

And there are more style changes announed by AP at the ACES convention in Philadelphia today, including datelines and a pullback in the abbreviation for microphone, and clarifications of several points.

First, Editor at Large Darrell Christian confirmed my post from early today that AP is officially going with "website," but the date of change has been moved up  -- to tomorrow, April 17.

But it is holding off on the change of spelling out all state names and on using "Canada" instead of provinces for Canadian cities.

Web Site to website
The Web site/website debate has been one of the longest and sometimes acrimonious in AP style. The change is being made "in accordance with common usage," Christian said. As an example, AP's solicitation of advice about such terms on its stylebook Web site brought 66 replies calling for the change, he said.

"It's fighting a losing battle. Usage has overtaken the two words," Christian said. Also webcam, webcast, webmaster. But Web page and Web feed.

David Minthorn, deputy standards editor and another of the troika now editing the stylebook, said those generally are used more in the two-word form.

As to other ongoing debates in the electronic arena

• Will Internet be lowercased? Christian: "No time soon." AP still considers it a proper noun.
• What about the hyphen in e-mail? There's "still some disagreement," Christian said in true understatement. It will be left as e-mail for now, and, he said, "At this point we have no intention of joining the parade" of those publications going to the nonhyphenated form.

AP moved the advisory on its wires about "website" just as the session was about to begin. No coincidence, Christian said. (But I'm told that seeing it all over the Internet for several hours beforehand didn't hurt either.)

State names spelled out - maybe soon instead of next month 
Applause broke out when Christian announced the AP is pulling back from its directive that as of May 15 it would spell out all state names. "But not necessarily forever," Christian said.

He blamed "in-house technical snags" for part of the reason, but it's also clear the crowd was ready to shoot and ask questions later if AP had not backed off. As noted by Gerri Berendzen of the Quincy Herald-Whig, unlike many changes that a desk might have to deal with once or twice a day, state names are an almost every-story occurrence and a real production issue.

The idea, Christian said, was to "create a consistent and universal style for domestic and international use." But he acknowledged that after the feedback the wire service had received, this needed more review.

This prompted me to again renew the call for AP to work with ACES to set up a users group that AP can consult for early feedback in such matters before it puts out an advisory and the big guns come out. Christian said AP would seriously consider it. Having worked with Darrell for many years and known him even longer, I take him at his word. Too often at AP in the past, "seriously consider it" was a blow-off term. (To reinforce the seriousness of some of these change that can otherwise seem wonky, read some reactions in this Poynter column. There can be very real production disruptions.)

It is unclear to me whether AP's new policy to use "Canada" instead of provinces after the names of  Canadian cities still stands. I'll admit - I forgot to ask, and Christian and Minthorn did not specifically comment on it.

In a follow-up e-mail from Christian, he confirms the AP is holding off on the change that would have substituted "Canada" for the province after Canadian cities.

Dateline changes
In a related matter, AP is restoring country names to some of its international datelines. The following cities should now again get the country after their name: Bogota, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Kabul.

"Mike" vs. "Mic"
Effective immediately, AP is reversing course on "mike" as the shorthand for microphone. As I wrote a week ago, this one was sure to provoke continued discussion, and it did, but apparently the discussion was short and came in a phone call from AP Broadcast, which was not at all happy. "We really screwed up on that," Christian said.

This one still isn't settled, however. "Mic" will be the AP preference for the noun. As for the verb? Well, let's just say AP is tiptoeing away from that one and hoping no one notices. Minthorn's answer was that, well, Webster's New World Dictionary, allows "mike" as the verb. When pressed by Bill Walsh of the Washington Post -- "So if I'm wearing a mike, m-i-c, I will be miked, m-i-k-e-d," Minthorn quietly said "yes," and things moved on.

Great Recession
The AP's sanctioning of this term to cover the recent economic unpleasantness has been the subject of some griping by editors who don't think the AP should be creating historical labels while the history is still being written.

Christian said this was another case of popular and increasing usage requiring the AP to arbitrate (and it's another example of how in the digital age, usage authorities like the AP are being put to the test to keep up with and evaluate the changes).

"I think it was simply that Great Recssion had been used increasingly" by writers as well as government officials, Christian said, "and the decision was made that if people were going to use it, we had to rule on it." Minthorn said the fulcrum point was when AP Graphics wanted to use the term and called for a ruling.

The AP consulted numerous authorities as well as its own reporters and "they said it made sense to capitalize it; it's in wide usage," Minthorn said.

(Christian also disputed the contention that the Great Depression, with which parallels often are drawn, was not used until after the economic catastrophe was largely over. He said AP has been able to tract the term's usage to 1934).

Other debated words, etc.
Christian said work force and under way will remain two words for now (except in nautical cases where underway is one word.

Wrack remains confusing. The question - more like statement - from the audience was thanks for clarifying that it was the preferred verb usage, but I still don't find it clarifying. The AP advisory that moved a few weeks ago said wracked: the preferred spelling when someone is wracked with doubt or pain. But it did not appear to change the existing stylebook entry that you rack your brain. I've asked Christian to clarify.

Christian, in a follow-up e-mail, confirms what I suspected: "Racked her brain" is CQ.


Why the style guidance? There's a dictionary entry that allows it, and it was being widely misused, Minthorn said.

I'll update if I hear anything back.

Using president's full first name: Christian said this again was an attempt at global uniformity, since President Barack Obama's first name was being used by media in other countries.

Stylebook tech: I suggested the stylebook incorporate "suggested results" so that if someone isn't quite sure how to spell something, he or she does not come up empty. Product manager Colleen Newvine said that is in the works.

Legal section: Minthorn says the goal in the new book is "de-legalizing it" so that the explanations are much easier to read.

Legislature: There were the usual gripes about AP reporters not following style. And there was no better illustration of the complexity of the stylebook, which has grown from a slim volume in 1953 to today's tome of 450 pages (even though Christian said, "We don't want to become Webster's Jr."), than when Christian and Minthorn stumbled over each other while trying to answer a woman's question about the style on "Legislature."

The style is that the word is capped when referring to a specific state governing body, even if the formal name is General Assembly, as long as you don't use General Assembly in the story. If you use General Assembly, however, legislature is lowercased as a shorthand for that term. Minthorn kept insisting to capitalize Legislature, while Christian kept pointing to the stylebok rule. The conversation ended with Minthorn saying it looked odd, and "put it up every time."


I'm not sure if that was a style ruling or just the start of more consideration of it.


Accents on the wire, as well as slashes: Christian, Minthorn and  Newvine said the AP's switch away from satellite transmission to the Internet-based AP News Exchange means the wire will regularly begin tranmsitting symbols such as / and @ later this year. I'm assuming from the question asked that accents will also be part of this mix. And that will undoubtedly touch off another round of debate about how various words adopted from foreign languages should be accented.

Oh well, there's always next year in Phoenix.

----

A bit more:
Simon Owens has a blog post on some of the organized pressure on AP to change its style to "website."

Tech Talk: New stuff from NAB - but not just for broadcasters

Chuck Fadley, proprietor extraordinaire of the newspaper video list, has a recap of what he just saw at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, and the crowd seems to be trending toward digital single-lens reflx (DSLR) cameras that can shoot video.

Lots of accessories, including compact high-quality lenses coming out for those rigs. Interestingly, he says, it was almost all Canon and accessory companies - Nikon had little presence.

There's also a nonlinear video editor for the iPhone,

Meanwhile, he says, you could pretty much hear the wind whistle at the some of the traditional TV camera suppliers' booths.

Fadley also is excited by the new "freedom chip" that he says didn't get much attention but that could turn the Internet into your new video provider, bypassing cable. The new initialism is "OTT" for "over the top" delivery of broadband to your TV.

His take on it all: "I left with the impression that the whole TV industry has its head in the sand."

AP Style - it will be "website" and spell out state names

Update, 4/23/2014: AP now reinstitutes the spell out state names style.
 
Update 4/16/2010: AP confirms website, but holds off on state names. See details.
 
AP is set to make some major changes in the upcoming stylebook. One of the most heatedly debated over the years is the spelling of "Web site" (AP) or "website" (as much of the online community does).

I've now been told that as of May 15, AP will switch to "website." It's one of the changes we'll hear more about today at the ACES 2010 conference in Philadelphia when AP editors Darrell Christian and David Minthorn appear. Still to be seen is whether AP adopts "email."

It hasn't been overly publicized, but for some time AP has been soliciting suggestions for changes it should make vis a vis social media in the upcoming stylebook, which usually comes out in May or early June. Conforming to "website" seems by far to be the biggest suggestion/gripe.

I don't know that the Web site/website change has gotten much attention, but another change coming May 15 has gotten some discussion. AP will start spelling out all state names. It also will start using "Canada" instead of the province, after Canadian cities.

It's a case where the demands of the digital age are overtaking the previous demands for brevity. In other words, when people search they are more likely to search for the full name than the arcane AP abbreviation (or they might search for the postal abbreviation). And since most media is now global media, the thought is that people overseas will know California better than Calif. But one commenter questions this, observing: "This strikes me as a lot of churn that will not generate a net gain in clarity and explicitness that perhaps the AP is hoping for.  And applying state names only to the US certainly isn’t going to improve consistency."


Of just as much interest to me is how many publications will follow AP.  On one hand, there remains a stubborn individuality. But on the other is the push toward editing hubs and standardization. (In an ACES session I participated in Thursday, some recent grads said we need to teach more about working in such hubs, and they complained about how many papers being brought into those hubs were resisting standardization of some basic style points, such as how to refer to colleges and universities (UVA vs. Virginia, for example).)

The adoption rate is of some interest to those of us who teach the craft, since our students' future employers still seem to express some interest in their knowing style. Question these days is, whose and what style?

Some other suggestions for AP:
- change "work force" to "workforce" as many publications have. Update Feb 2012: Since this post draws so many results in Google, please note that AP has now updated to one word.
- give up "under way" and follow the lead of publications such as the Washington Post and use "underway."
- Simplify the maddening number style so that figures are used only when there is a dollar sign or similar symbol ($3 million), for a fraction greater than one (he had 9 1/2 bottles of milk), or in things like recipes. Otherwise, spell out from one through nine: he's six feet tall, three million miles, etc.

Finally, create an advisory panel to discuss such things so you get more reaction as to how it will affect members' operations. And this should be done through ACES because copy editors are your natural stakeholders, not as an offshoot of APME.

ACES2010: Are editors necessary?

It was a provocative title put forth by outgoing ACES President Chris Weinandt for one of Thursday's ACES sessions, and it apparently stemmed from a blog post I made last summer from the journalism profs breakfast at AEJMC. At the time I wrote about remarks by Josh Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab:

The question arose from the audience, of course, "Does quality no longer matter?" Benton's response (after noting he was once a reporter who "had copy editors as friends") is that it is no longer valid to say there is just one metric for quality - what copy desks do to stories. If a copy desk is focused on filtering out a voice and creating a corporate style, no, he said.

Benton said many reporters write differently when they know it will be read by editors than when they know it's going direct to readers. "I learned more from blogging because I had to pay attention to readers," he said.

At the time, I remarked after talking with some folks afterward, that some had left upset.

This time it was Benton engaging with Charles Knittle, chief copy editor for world and national news at the New York Times. By the end, it seemed to me that there was more closing in on some consensus than division.

You can read more detailed reports from the ACES blog and here, so I'm not going blow by blow. But a couple of things stood out:

• Benton's basically arguing that newspeople need some unedited channels - think Twitter and blogging (but maybe not the latter in all cases, depending on the amount of mischief that can be done) - to reach audiences directly. He says his writing improved because as a blogger for the Dallas Morning News he had to think a lot more about his audience.
• Knittle said copy editors "have got to get in and fight for our place." That place is much more in the middle of the process, not just at the end. Copy editors should realize one of their purposes is "to help civilized discourse." And later: "I don't think there's any writing that gets better without an editor."

 Benton sees the job changing substantially. He notes that many online startups actually have more editors than reporters. But the jobs are far different. They are more like the skills of a wire editor, sifting through large quantities of information and finding important connections. They also are like the skills of editors at smaller papers, working as mentors, working with people not especially strong in journalism as user-contributed content grows. They are "engagement editors" like the ones Albritton's new D.C. startup is hiring editors before reporters. In short, the "multipurposed editor."

Benton also noted that the traditional role of a unified voice for a paper goes away online.

There were two key points of insight I took away, the sorts of things I will think a lot about:

• Knittle: Copy editors were unnecessarily smug when pagination rolled into newsrooms in the 1990s. Hundreds of printers and backshop makeup people were laid off. A few copy editors were hired. But what the editors actually were learning was a "machine skill," the same kind of skill those printers and makeup people had, the same kind of skill that is easily displaced.**
• Benton: It used to be there was a financial penalty for having an error - especially a mechanical one like having too much copy, because it could displace advertising in the limited pages of a newspaper. In that environment, copy editors played a vital role in policing the production process, which in a sense includes style (often put in to save space) and brevity. It could cost seriously to break up a page if errors were not caught early in the process. But, "for better or worse, we are at a time when the cost of an error ... is coming down in terms of correcting it." Now, having people in the production end instead of the content creation end has the greater financial penalty.

That latter observation, I think, is especially important and thought-provoking.

** In an earlier session on the future of editing, Susan Keith, a professor at Rutgers, outlined a rather dismal outlook based on depth interviews looking, among other things, at editing consolidation in Australia and Canada. She sees some reflection of Braverman's "de-skilling" theory and routinization of editing. One thing she concluded, in talking about the continued separation (philosophically and operationally, if not physically) of online operations from main editing desks, was that audience demand for well-edited Web content -- at least in a way to attract online ads -- has not been great enough to influence the predominance of the "get the paper out" mentality she still found among most of those she interviewed.

ACES 2010: Copy editing on the radio

A panel of ACES folk were on WHYY Thursday explaining what copy editors are, what they do and how they are endangered.

Listen in. Or download the MP3.

David Sullivan kindly mentions this blog at 28:42 left. 

ASNE10 - Back to the future

I've been peeking in on the unofficial ASNE10 event blog, and I just can't help feeling, well, feeling like it's sooooooo back to the future.

Here's an example post: Editors Stress Convergence at ASNE10

• One panelist urged editors to consider: "What can we do to reinvent how we package?"
• With circulation and readership on a general decline, editors must take into account how they will get and hold their readers' attention, which includes taking marketing into mind.
• On the future of journalism, [Jane] Hirt [ME/news and features, Chi Trib] said that what we today consider newspapers will change into news organizations, dispersing information for multiple platforms.
• The panel was generally optimistic about the future of the industry as long as editors make the effort to adapt to the needs and wants of their readers.

Now there are some revolutionary thoughts -- in 2005.

(The other interesting thing - try to post a comment. I couldn't get it to work. If the comments are turned off, it's sort of emblematic, isn't it? I was going to share the link to my Amy Webb post on their Amy Webb post, but not to be. So you'll just have to get the one-say here.

The real history of the Internet

Al Tompkins gave some publicity to this last week, but you really should watch it.

It's video of former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt speaking at the Columbia Business School explaining all the government actions taken to favor the Internet, including the decision that it, not broadcasting, should become the nation's common medium:

• "Stole" revenue from the phone network by giving Internet users and service providers free access to it.
• Declared the Internet to be a local service, thus avoiding the 3-cent-per-minute tariff for traffic across state lines.
• Decided online purchases should be tax free.
• Delayed HDTV
• Decided broadcasting "had become a threat to democracy."
  

And he says the government is contracting broadcasting spectrum to favor broadband.

Hundt isn't hurling some conservative broadside at this. He's explaining how he was deep in the thicket of it.

J-lab/New Voices: Peering into the future

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked at a state press association meeting to peer into the future and try to give the assembled publishers and editors a sense of where things might be going.

I talked about HTML5, which will be multimedia oriented (here's the summary from Wikipedia and the gory details from W3C, if you really want to wonk out). I also talked about augmented reality through apps such as Layar, geocoding and the idea of a Web without Web sites. (Think about it - the last time you whipped out the smartphone and punched the button on that app, did you go to a Web site? Chances not, yet you certainly had an online experience.)

I also stressed that every news operation, even the smallest community one that hasn't been hit that hard by the recession, needs a mobile strategy. Why? Because even in the backroads and hamlets, that thing people are carrying around in their purses and on their belts ain't a newspaper, Bubba. Cell phone/smartphone technology is following Moore's law of doubling in power, etc., about every 18 months.

But Amy Webb of Webb Media Group can do it a lot better than I can, and she was at the J-lab confab today, so I'm just going to run out the notes I took and let you follow whatever links your hearts desire.

But you've got to sit through the 10-second commercial first: What contact I've had with Webb and through those I know in the industry, she's been about as accurate as anyone about all this. Do yourself a favor; visit Knowledgewebb, her company's training site, and sign up for her free newsletter. You might find something else you like (that costs extra, however).

Now the show:

Tools that can work for you:

What's important and what can wait? How nimble must you be? Do consumers really want everything out there.

Ask yourself:
- Who are you really developing for?
- Will it stick?
- Is it comprehensive enough?
- Will it generate engagement that is habit forming?
- Do you need all the features?

Six spheres, social media is a part of all of them that ties it together:
Traditional media
Web ("just stuff you get going online")
Mobile
E-readers
Tablets (iPad gets all the publicity, but her firm is tracking 18 from 18 manufacturers, some yet to be released)
Connected TV (plug your TV into the Internet/ AT&T's FIOS fiber-to-house broadband vastly expanding options).

Computers in cars: "Pretty soon you're going to be driving a computer down the road."

Do not assume that people are only engaging in traditional or web spheres because of social or economic status. (Doug's comment: Mobile, for instance, is becoming so cheap that for many people it is leapfrogging the traditional computer and is the way they are accessing online.)

Trend 1: User engagement 2.0
It's being offered in unusual places, it's not just tweeting the latest thing, new media organizations have found a "sweet spot" of producing content and getting content contributed. You have to be part of the community to really understand.

Social media being incorporated in unexpected places. Land's End, Netflix, for example, have incorporated social networks.

Ask yourself:
- Who is the audience?
- Are they where you think they are?
- What are the expectations of the audience (tell others? contribute? you listen?)?
- Are you willing to participate?

Keep the sharing options on your site to a minimum - the ones your audience is using.
She does not like AddThis or Shareomatic and similar services. Says they produce too confusing a list, most of which people seldom use. Points, for instance, to Mashable, which has just Twitter, Facebook, Digg, RSS and e-mail. But for this to work you have to know where your audience is sharing. (See Quarkbase below.)

Tools:
Quarkbase – get site metrics, most popular social media referrals
Facebook Connect –Problem is that with Facebook you can lose lots of data.
Disqus – aggregate comments (My note: I've had mixed results on various sites that have it installed; sometimes it seems to get into weird loops.)
KnowEm – plug in your username and it will go through all the social networks and see who has your name already.

In discussing content management systems, Webb's one recommendation was to get off Expression Engine (the CMS Media General is using for Hartsville Today, the local site I am involved with). She sees it as less extensible and flexible than most of the others.

Trend 2: Geolocal engagement
Why the hyperlocal model does not work. Things like LoudonExtra (the Washington Post's defunct site) and Everyblock just can't be hyperlocal enough or don't deliver the information the way people want it. Webb says Everyblock, for instance, gets fewer than 200,000 visits/month and that AOL-Patch metrics are "awful."

Consumers want to know what is happening, but they want more sophistication. Content has to be niche. Otherwise there is too much competition, too many platforms. She used this example of a smart phone app, Offender Locator, that takes data like Everyblock's but lets the user query it wherever he or she is -- it is location aware -- and pull down a list of sex offenders nearby.

For the consumer local is where I am right now, not necessarily physical; just as likely topical. Less about ZIP code and more about what I am doing right now. Real-time! Not just about maps and citizen-journalism. Action must be associated with content and conversation – context must be social.

Twitter, for instance, now has location info and the accompanying privacy concerns.
She calls this the check-in culture accompanied by a rapid change in user expectations.
- Your consumers want hyperlocal, but the way they define it.
- Tied to local.
- Socially interactive.
- Wrapped in opportunity (points, games)
- Not repurposed or stale.

Some other tools:
- Micello – maps for the inside of buildings. She showed some shopping malls. Someone raised the idea, however, that this will last "until homeland security shuts it down."
- Foursquare – "Twitter with location" as you "check in" to places. However, there also is a gaming aspect – get badges based on how many check-ins.
- Gowalla – she doesn't like it as much as Foursquare, but it's an alternative.
- Miso (gomiso.com) – connect with others while watching movies, videos, etc.
- Apple's iGroup allows you to set up a local social network where you are.
- Create your own iPhone check-in app through Double Dutch, $499 setup fee and $40 a month.
- Fourwhere: See what Foursquare users who have checked in from a location say about it.

Trend 3: Augmented reality
Two aspects to this: Show a coded marker to a webcam and cause an action to happen (think Esquire's recent augmented reality edition) or use the camera on your mobile phone, linked to geocoding or image recognition.

Some examples:
- Wikitude: An app available for all phones – install it, point your phone camera at something, like a monument, and get information about it.
- Post office: Hold item you want to ship up to camera and virtual box simulator will tell you size box, etc.
- Rayban: Virtual mirror allows you to "try on" glasses.
- Acrossair: Among other things, makes apps that allow you to hold up yout iPhone and see nearest subway stations in the direction you are holding it.
- Toozla: Voice activated augmented reality
- Layar: Maybe the most widely known, out of Holland, put the app in your phone and you can look at several "layers" of information such as shopping, real estate, etc. Or you can create your own.
- StreetSpark: Augmented reality dating application. Use your phone to see if any fellow sparkers are near you; strike up a conversation (or … whatever).
- Recognizr – Point a phone at a person's face and find out what social networks they are on (not public, but available business to business).
- Face.com: Tool being used by Google's Picasa photo site. From the Picasa site: Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums.
- Google Goggles: Scan logos, books, text, etc., and get info returned.

Bottom line:
- People are uploading content
- They are tagging content
- They are geocaching that content
- It's creating wide databases of info that can link people to locations and history of actions
- Consumers are starting to search and discover via social networks and mobile instead of the traditional search engine.

(Follow up: Webb's remarks Monday at ASNE.)

A turn of phrase that should have long shelf life

Michael Quinion, proprietor of World Wide Words, has a turn of phrase in this week's e-mail edition* that I shall certainly appropriate freely and at the proper times.

Talking about neologisms "chexting" (text messages among cheating lovers) and "sexting" (sexual text messages), Quinion refers to a Reuters article with this line: But don't be fooled into thinking you're safe. If you've sexted and chexted, you might soon be "exted" by your spouse.

Quinion also references "brexting," or breaking up via text message. He then observes (referring to chexting and brexting):

I suspect that both terms are already past their sell-by date.

A perfect response at the next copy editor-reporter or professor-student dust-up about some shopworn word or phrase. (It may have been around for a bit - I'm not sure - but it's fresh enough that used at opportune times it carries that wonderful toss-off-without-offending tone.)

Bring it on. (Oops, sorry. Couldn't help myself.)

*(His newsletter does not appear on the Web site until a few days after. I encourage you to sign up to get it fresh in your e-mail boxes each Friday night. Witty, refreshing and a dang interesting read.)

J-lab/New Voices: Thoughts from the front lines

As mentioned in previous post, am at a New Voices meeting in D.C. where we are reviewing five years of experience with these funded local/citizen journalism/community news sites.

Ours, Hartsville Today, was one of the original 2005 grantees, and, after a recent crash that wiped it out, is slowly being reborn.

Some things that struck me from the first session:

• People often think these sites are, as one speaker put it, "a real newspaper and expected us to send reporters." It takes a lot of education to get around this. For our part, after talking to people in the community before launch, they clearly told us we were the "J"ournalists. They didn't want to be, but they felt they had a role in filling in the cracks and extending the local twice-weekly's coverage. That's why we have tended to use the term "community storytellers."
• It's critical to figure out who your audience is (so "old" media, isn't it?).
• "Just keep going" if you are convinced you are providing a service.
• People love the police blotter. Tracking shows they read items on it three or four times (Susie Pedner, NewCastleNow).
• Save as much money as you can to pay writers (in our grant we built that in as an expense)
• Use things like Spot.us to extend your ability to fund writers (especially with Spot.us now expanding) - Susan Mernit, Oakland Local.
• "Facebook is the AOL of Today" - Mernit. Lots of people hang out here and Oakland Local gets lots of referrals this way. (Note: I agree with her. I think I've mentioned here that I now get more comments on this blog's feed fed into FB than I do on the blog itself.)

Mary Lou Fulton, the force behind one of the original local news sites, Northwest Voice (now Bakersfield Voice) and now with The California Endowment, says more foundations are looking at funding media and the key is aligning with their areas of interest.

Several people talked about how to engage community - send out postcards, use business cards, make sure your contributors know their stuff is being read. (We found the business cards and a couple of relatively inexpensive banners - total about $150 - made at a local print shop were useful.)

And from Clodah Rule, Cambridge Community TV: You can train people to use the technology, but you can't train them how to be invested in the community. So find those invested and work with them. Amen - exactly what we found with HVTD.

J-lab/New Voices: Best line of the day

Am at a J-lab, New Voices gathering in Washington today. All the New Voices community news and similar projects funded over the past five years. Fantastic group. Great ideas.

Best line so far is from a survey Great Lakes Echo did:
Which Great Lakes invasive species is your former significant other?

Media General consolidates design/editing of metros

Well, Media General has finally dropped the lopng-awaited other shoe -- it's consolidating design and some editing for its three metro papers:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Media General to Consolidate Copy Editing and Page Design for its Three Metro Newspapers

RICHMOND, Va. – Media General, Inc. (NYSE: MEG) said today it will consolidate copy editing and page design for its three metro newspapers, The Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal.

The consolidated metro editing and design operation will have two groups, one in Tampa, Fla., and one in Richmond, Va. The operation will be led by a single managing editor located at the Richmond facility. Each of the two groups will have primary responsibility for particular sections and pages for all three metro newspapers. The next steps are to select the managing editor, install common production software and establish common design elements that will facilitate production efficiencies. The consolidated operation is expected to start up in the third quarter of this year.

The metro operation will be the third of its kind for Media General. The first became operational in Lynchburg, Va., in April 2009. The second started up in Hickory, N.C., in October, 2009. At this time, 12 of Media General’s 23 metro and community newspapers are either part of or transitioning to a consolidated editing and design operation. The company expects to have all of its newspapers in a consolidated editing and design operation by the end of the year. Once all newspapers have completed the transition, Media General expects to realize annualized cost savings of more than $1 million from efficiencies related to this initiative, starting in 2011. The company intends to use a portion of the savings to focus on intensified local news coverage.

“Our consolidated editing and design operations allow our newsrooms to focus on strong local news reporting. Stories will be edited once rather than multiple times, and we can take advantage of economies of scale and centralization of top talent,” said Donna Reed, Media General’s Vice President of Content. “Our customers will be unaffected by this internal process change and all news decisions will continue to be made by our local editors,” said Ms. Reed.

Over the past 10 years, Media General has consolidated and centralized a number of broadcast functions, including traffic, master control and graphics, and newspaper functions, including printing and distribution and various call centers. This approach allows the company’s properties to focus on their local communities while creating resource groups that both increase quality and provide significant process efficiencies.

The Lynchburg editing and design center produces the pages for The (Lynchburg) News & Advance, Danville Register & Bee, and the company’s Rockingham, N.C., community newspapers. The (Manassas, Va.) News & Messenger and The (Waynesboro, Va.) News Virginian are in the process of transitioning there.

The Hickory, N.C., editing and design center produces the pages for the Hickory Daily Record, Statesville Record & Landmark, The (Morganton) News Herald, The McDowell News, and the weekly Mooresville Tribune. The Florence (S.C.) Morning News and (Concord & Kannapolis, N.C.) Independent Tribune are in the process of transitioning there.

If you're heading to BEA, NAB, RDTNA in Vegas - free access to NAB show

I got an e-mail in that seems to check out, so I'm onpassing. Comes from a Jason Rouse at Tuvel Communications, which is repping the NAB show next week, April 10-15 (a phone call to the number on the company's Web site confirms the e-mail).

Rouse is offering to CSJ readers "free access to the exhibit floor, opening keynote and state of the industry address, info sessions, content theater and destination broadband theater and exhibits. Please pass this along and visit http://ow.ly/13T8Q to redeem or register at http://nabshow.com/register with the code A913."

He lists this as a $150 value.

I've followed the links as far as I can without actually registering and, again, things seem legit, though always caveat emptor.

AP Style - Great Recession

I've been behind in noting some AP style changes, and one of the most notable - and controversial - to come up in the interim is the decision to name the recent economic unpleasantness the "Great Recession."

There's already been blowback - at the American Copy Editors Society and from European journalists. The reactions seem to be summed up best by Lisbeth Kirk, editor-in-chief of the EUObserver: "Let the historians, not the sub-editors, categorise major historical turning points."

I'd written earlier on what I thought the AP was trying to do, so I won't get into that again here. I just thought it worth noting the entry as part of my periodic AP style series.

Here are a few of the other more noted of the slew of recent changes:

• Breathalyzer: AP makes clear every breath test device is not a Breathalyzer.
• tea party: Lowercase the political "movement."
• Mike, not mic, as shortened form for microphone. Watch for this to continue to be a subject of debate, as the very subject, before AP, already has provoked some heated prose. "Mic" seems to be gaining ground because it's what you find on most audio boards. A Google search for "open mike night" finds about 75,000 hits and about eight times as many for "open mic night."
  
• mixed martial arts, not Ultimate Fighting, which is a trademark.
• wracked: the preferred spelling when someone is wracked with doubt or pain. (However, the preferred verb is still "racked" when it comes to saying someone racked their brain. That one's already in the stylebook.)
• Q-and-A format: Use Q-and-A in the body of a story, too, if necessary, not Q & A.
• waitlist for the noun, wait-list for the verb
• taser: use "stun gun" if you don't know the brand. Taser is an acronym for a specific brand (and do you know what the acronym stands for?*). The AP advises against verbing it to produce "tasered" unless it's in a quote. I guess you say "use a taser on." My prediction: That skirmish already is lost. Just turn on your local TV news. The alternatives are just too clunky and "un-hip."
  

Sports:
A reminder that it's no longer NCAA Division I-A and Division I-AA. Now call the big schools the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the smaller fry Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). So much for simplification.

Also, a sharp-eyed reader found an error in the stylebook. Federal Air Marshals are now under the Transportation Security Administration, not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, their former home.

*Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle

AP creates investigative units

AP says it's creating four regional investigative units so reporters throughout the wire service who latch on to a good story and need the extra fire power can call the cavalry.

Each unit will have specialists in data analysis, public records discovery and multimedia presentation, according to the memo by AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Oreskes that was run by Editor & Publisher.

Good for them. I hope it works out.

The AP has tried this in fits and starts dating back 20+ years when Bill Ahearn was executive editor. Back in the early 1990s it hired the likes of Bill Dedman to create a computer assisted reporting unit and take the gospel to the bureaus. For many reasons (including some territorialism by the bureaus), things limped along, produced a few good projects, limped again, about fell apart, were revived, etc. Frank Bass has been one of the mainstays of the efforts.

(I first met Bill at an IRE conference in the late 1980s and was happy to see him come on board and work with him at AP.)

Maybe this time, which by my count is the third or fourth iteration of this idea, it will take deep root. Nothing but good can come from that. The trick will be making sure the bureau folks retain some ownership of the projects and don't get big-footed as happened with some stories after AP started its regional reporter system.

(And noting the shout-out Oreskes gives to my former colleague Jim Davenport for his work in tracking the questionable use of state planes by "Luv Guv" Mark Sanford.)