AP Style - Minthorn profile

Nice profile by Paul Fahri in the Washington Post on AP Stylebook co-editor David Minthorn.

As usual, the standard crop of complaining comments over "email/e-mail," etc. Best response from commenter TBG: He can't be wrong if he sets the style. That's like saying you spell your last name wrong.

As said here before - the only style you have to follow is the one used by the person signing your paycheck.

Such arguments are nice dalliances over a cappuccino or latte, brandy, Scotch, or other libation of your choice. But once the drink's gone, move on and get a life.

Reporting Resource: Governors Journal

Got the pointer from J-Lab ...

Governor's Journal is all about the nation's governors.

It's edited out of a PR agency in D.C., but from what I've seen, it's pretty straight-up stuff, and at least the transparency level of who's behind it is high. Worthy of adding to your feeds.

Dear AP: check those thermometers

AP apparently has a little confusion going with Fahrenheit and Celsius - or a massive case of hyperbole:

Thanks for the tip from a former student who pointed to the original criticism on Newsbusters.

AP enlarges its linking credits

The AP is further joining the link economy with the memo from senior managing editor Mike Oreskes that when one of the cooperative's stories is based substantially on an AP member's reporting, the AP will henceforth link directly to the story, not just to the other newsroom's home page. (Paid Content, Nieman Lab)

This is a good thing if it gets members also thinking about their need to do the same thing - link more to their sources of information.

I'm not holding my breath, however, as noted in several other posts on this topic (hit the "linking" label below).

And as Andrew Phelps at Neiman notes, several media sites don't appear to be able to handle the code (sigh), showing me once again that it's the technology and vendors that are holding the industry back as much as anything.

Oreskes' memo, however, also shows the difficulty of trying to be too specific in policies on these things instead of just going ahead and linking frequently, as the rest of the Web does. For instance, if the story is mostly from one member, link; do that even if you do more reporting. But if it's from two or more don't link or if you've done substantial additional reporting .... sheesh.

I have a better idea. If you base a story on someone else's reporting, even if it was just the kernel for the idea, link to it. If you are unsure, link to it. It solves so many issues.

Dear NYT: Details or links please

The New York Times again shows, to my mind, that it's still struggling with the idea of what readers might want from a story and how to more deftly link to solve that.

Case in point is the NYT's story on Delta's plans to cut service to 24 rural airports.

Uh, what 24 might those be?

It mentions a few in the story, but it took a reader in the comments to provide a link to a list. (The NYT did link to the Delta news release, but then it took yet another click to get to the list itself. As a reader, my immediate question is what 24 - any cities I fly into? That question should be openly answered on the article page, not hinted at through a link to the release that then requires another hop.)

There's a graphic that accompanies the Times' story, but it's basically useless unless you can click to expand it substantially with the cities captioned. You can't. (Oh, you can click, but it doesn't get much bigger and no cities are captioned.)

Tales from the S.C. DMV - clueless in Blythewood

The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles, once thoroughly reviled as many such departments remain around the country, has made great strides in recent years. I've bought and sold a couple of cars over the past five years, and I can honestly say the DMV's telephone response service has been quick and thorough in answering any questions I had.

But invariably, one finds that the Rent-a-Clue truck routes reach only so far, and apparently they do not pass near at least one office in Blythewood, the exurb where DMV moved its headquarters several years ago, one assumes to escape the advancing mob with pitchforks and torches.

I gave one of our old vehicles - a 2000 model - to my son in another state after one of his two family cars died. On Monday, he went to yon DMV in that state to transfer the title.

And he was stopped dead in his tracks.

There is a duplicate title, he was told, as the clerk read what the computer had spit out.

Huh?

This was a one-owner car, never transferred out of our hands, lien settled, title duly stamped, squeaky clean paperwork. All he should have had to do was hand over the papers and walk out of the other state's DMV either with a new registration or knowing one would shortly be in the mail.

Instead, of course, he's panicked and pissed and on the phone to me.

OK. Let me call the SC DMV. "Agent 323" was earnest and somewhat helpful. Nope, no duplicate title, she said, once we got the VIN straightened out (the "D" and the "O" look very similar on those old titles, and I was afraid the other state had gotten it wrong). So call back to son - no problems here. Make sure they got this VIN right.

A few minutes later, son's back on the phone. Still showing a duplicate. Same title number, but issued in July 2002.

Huh?

OK, back to the SC DMV, this time "Agent 318." She seems to know exactly the problem. "When our old computer system switched in July 2002," she begins explaining.

Uh oh.

It seems the electronic switchover created these phantom duplicate titles, at least in some cases. Well, yes, DMV can help. She'll email the appropriate people and within 24 to 48 hours they will send a letter to me and my son (they'll also fax it to me) that should make things all nicey-nice with the other state.

Of course, until then, he has a car with a screwed-up title that technically isn't valid in that state except to get a new one, plus we're waiting for him to mail back the plates that we need by the end of the week when the temp tags on our new wheels run out.

All this, of course, raises some questions:

• Surely we're not the first folks to try to transfer the title in another state on an S.C. title issued before July 2002.
• If this is a known problem, why does the customer have to wait to find out at the other end, then come back requesting a letter?
• It's nine flaming years after the switch. You mean to tell me this couldn't be fixed by now?

What, was DMV expecting every pre-2002 car bought in S.C. to be retitled in S.C. (where, of course, it wouldn't be a problem)?

One wonders how many people have been inconvenienced by this (and why some enterprising reporter hasn't followed up).

Hello? Anyone home out there in Blythewood?

USAGE: Am I wrong on this adverse vs. averse argument?

OK, folks,  step right up, pay your dollah, and smack ol Doug in the face with a cream pie - if I'm wrong in this usage argument.

From a Randy Hines column on language and style errors in this week's Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin http://snpainfo.org/eBulletin/07.14.11.htm (scroll down, or, if you want just that column, the PDF is http://snpainfo.org/eBulletin/print/SNPA%20eBulletin%2007.14.11-Hines.pdf).

Q1       The sportswriter was averse to using imminent writing coach, Jim Stasiowski.

A1       The sports writer was adverse to using eminent writing coach Jim Stasiowski.
Despite dictionary spellings for sportswriter, our AP bible reminds us of this exception as two words.  Averse means unfavorable; adverse means opposed.  Despite Jim’s protests, he is somewhat famous or eminent in journalism circles.  The informal title before the name does not need a comma. 


To which I wrote that I disagreed that it should be "adverse" and that the original "averse" is correct. My argument:
- What is being expressed here is an attitude, and "averse to" is the common American English expression to show opposition as an attitude.
- The object of the aversion is the "using," not "Stasiowski," and "averse" is usually used to express opposition to concepts rather than people.

I think I'm backed up in this usage note from one of several references I consulted yet again to make sure what I thought I understood all these years was what I understood:

Adverse means 'hostile, unfavorable, opposed,' and is usually applied to situations, conditions, or events—not to people: : the dry weather has had an adverse effect on the garden. Averse is related in origin and also has the sense of 'opposed,' but is usually employed to describe a person’s attitude: I would not be averse to making the repairs myself.

(I suggested another test would be substituting "using" for "making" in that usage note - they line up nicely.)

(For now, please don't suggest "opposes" for "is averse/adverse to" - yep, probably better, clearer writing, but let's color within the lines of what the original question was trying to illustrate.)

I also noted this about the explanation put forth as to why there should be no comma:

The use of the comma (or proper nonuse of it in this case) does not have to do with whether it is a formal or informal title. It has to do with whether there is more than one eminent writing coach. Since there is more than one (though few of Jim's caliber), the phrase is restrictive and thus no comma.

So, do I have a clue here, or is it time to send Doug back to a usage re-education camp?

AP Style - "HuffPost"

For those who like to keep track of esoterica on AP style, the shortened form of the Huffington Post shall henceforth officially be "HuffPost," according to the latest guidance issued today from the hermetically sealed room deep inside the AP pyramid on New York's middle West Side.

(It really is a unique room if you can ever get an invitation - the Elvis on velvet paintings are especially notable, and Darrell Christian in a shaman's outfit? Absolutely not to be missed.)

Gentle kidding asside, AP is following the masses here, 34 million hits for HuffPost on Google to 2 million for "HuffPo."

However, in keeping with the occasional tone we like here at CSJ Plaza, we will contine to use HuffPo. It seems to capture the essence better.

CSJ on Tumblr

A new branch of the Common Sense Journalism megaplex has opened on Tumblr.

I'll probably be putting a lot of the more visual and quick-hit stuff up there and cross-referencing here.

First couple are a screw-up in a hed and an ad that needs to understand you don't need "$" if you say "dollars."

A look at the underbelly of TV journalism

And this time, not from the U.S., but from Canada.

Oh, Canada! Could it be so bad as Kai Nagata (formerly of the CBC) laid out in his 3,000-word post on why he quit as CTV's Quebec City bureau chief?

The most quoted quote from Nagata, 24: So I didn’t quit my job because I felt frustrated or that my career was peaking. I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means.

But here's also another:
I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo. And if I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.

We can now cue the ongoing and seemingly never-ending debate about whether postmodern journalism can exist without an acknowledgment that objectivity is dead - long live transparency and knowing where the journalist is coming from.
 
In a nutshell, Nagata trots out many of the same criticisms we've often heard about shallowness, chasing the royals when there is "real news," ideology passing for news, etc. Read it and make your own decision. From my days in TV and my continuing association with those in that end of the business, it certainly rings true, but is it too strident, or perhaps not strident enough?

The CBC follows up with a chat with Nagata and a link to a slightly snarky response from a National Post reporter. (In essence: What? Nagata discovers journalism is a business that has some boundaries? Heavens me.)

Ledes: Why the extra words?

There seems to be in vogue among reporters the need to throw a few chosen extra words in ledes to "liven them up" or make them seem chummy.

To often, however, they just get in the way and just fuel the idea that the reporter has an agenda. Like this:

State Democrats clamoring for the resignation of Lt. Gov. Ken Ard might get some help from an unlikely source: Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson. 

 Why is "an unlikely source" needed? Isn't that clear from specifying that Democrats might get help from a Republican? Actually, it would be more profitable if the writer had specified that Ard is a Republican, instead of making the reader connect the dots.

State Democrats clamoring for the resignation of Republican Lt. Gov. Ken Ard might get help from another Republican, Attorney General Alan Wilson.

I think readers probably are smart enough with that to figure out it's unusual, dontcha think?

Joe Wilson's finances - a case of shoddy journalism

What would you think if you saw this headline?

Report finds congressman in debt

Does it sound to you like he is in over his head? I'm betting a fair number of people would, and that's just the beginning of the problems I see with a story today on Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.. - he of the "You lie" remark fame - and his finances. It was published in the Greenville News (pay wall) and reprinted in my local paper, The State (where I can't find it online except in the subscription required e-edition).

(In disclosure let me say I know Wilson in passing from Boy Scouts. I've never voted for the man and generally don't agree with his positions. But that doesn't mean he should be the target of slipshod journalism.)

Here are the relevant parts (the bulk of the story is reprinted here for educational uses since it cannot be easily linked to):

WASHINGTON — A state Republican congressman who has accused the Obama administration of being fiscally irresponsible owed between $165,000 and $325,000 in loans and credit-card debt last year.
    U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of Spring-dale reported the debts on his recently released personal financial disclosure statements for 2010.
    Congressional lawmakers are required to file the statements each year. The statements report assets in broad ranges and are not required to include a lawmaker’s primary residence. Wilson’s statement shows he owed between $165,000 and $325,000 in six personal loans, one home-equity loan, and credit card debt.
    Wilson reported total liabilities between $765,000 and $1.57 million. That includes two mortgages — each worth between $250,000 and $500,000 – for properties in Washington and Sapphire, N.C., and a mortgage worth between $100,000 and $250,000 for property in Springdale.
    Wilson’s report shows “he is almost certainly under some (financial) pressure,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.
    “This report raises more questions than it answers,” she said.
    Lawmakers are required to disclose personal debts of at least $10,000, Krumholz said.
    Wilson did not respond to requests for more details about his finances. …
    Like other House Republicans, Wilson has criticized the Obama administration for “job-killing” economic policies, and has urged spending cuts and fiscal restraint.
    On June 22, he delivered a floor speech accusing the administration of “spending and borrowing money at a reckless rate.”
    Wilson reported assets worth between $1.2 million and $2.68 million. Most of that is real estate and a timeshare on Hilton Head Island.
    The asset and liability ranges in his report show Wilson was worth approximately $386,000 to $796,000 last year, according to Jock Friedly, founder of LegiStorm, a website that posts financial disclosure records, congressional salary data and other fiscal information.
    That range does not include the value of Wilson’s primary residence.
    Analysts say it’s unusual for members of Congress to report significant debt. ...
    Wilson appears to rank “somewhere in the middle of the pack in Congress in terms of net asset levels,” Friedly wrote in an email. …
    Their annual salaries – $174,000 for non-leadership members of Congress like Wilson – are not included on the reports.
    Wilson reported extra income of nearly $39,000 last year in pension payments from the South Carolina state retirement system, the National Guard and the U.S. military, according to his records.
    Additionally, he earned between $5,000 and $15,000 in rent from his property in Springdale, his report shows.

The story invites one to read between the lines and come to a conclusion that isn't necessarily there - that somehow he's being a bit hypocritical by taking on six-figure short term debt and up to seven figures in overall debt.

The article spends the first 12 grafs suggesting how irresponsible Wilson might be without ever telling us about his assets or cash flow, let alone doing even a rudimentary analysis. That's left to the bottom of the article and mostly for the reader to suss out.

Whether he's accused the administration of being fiscally irresponsible or the best thing since sliced bread has little to do with outstanding short-term loans and credit card debt of between $165,000 and $325,000. It has everything to do with whether he can carry that debt.

One of the first suggestions it may not be a problems is that Wilson's disclosure (available at http://www.legistorm.com/) shows one personal loan as far back as 1999, three others in 2006 and one last year. The home equity was in December 2007. That doesn't suggest panic borrowing to cover other shortfalls (which might indicate irresponsibility), but a measured flow of financing. Two of the mortgages were in December 2004 and one in December 2007.

There is no indication any are in trouble.

It's not even unusual in some cases to have current liabilities exceed cash flow if you can convert some assets to tide you over. As a college instructor, my finances, from the outside, look like a disaster every May to August. Cash flow is far less than current liabilities. But during the "regular season" I squirrel away money in investments that then are slowly converted to cash during the summer.

I've even gone entire years in the "red" while doing house remodeling, but it was hardly irresponsible, as I knew the liquid assets and eventual cash flow were there.

So, yes, as Krumholz said, Wilson might be under some pressure. But is it unreasonable pressure? Is it irresponsible?

Friedly estimates Wilson's net worth at  $386,000 to $796,000. (If you just do a raw assets-minus-liabilities analysis, Wilson could be $323,000 in the hole or $1.9 million in the black).
Using Friedly's numbers, even if Wilson had to pay off everything today, he'd still have assets left. If you looked at a business in that light, you might consider it a worthy investment.

With much of Wilson's wealth in real estate, there could be some liquidity problems, and the net at a forced sale could be less than what is listed. So maybe there is some pressure, but net worth is just one screen, and a bunt one.

Let's look at income and current liabilities.

The article lists his income at from $218,000 to $228,000 - his $174,000 congressional salary, his $39,000 in pension payments, and $5,001 to $15,000 in rental income. The writer does not explain why he lists that income but leaves out from $45,000 to $145,000 in "unearned" rental income listed from the "Moseley and Wilson" partnership that owns a number of properties.

But to be conservative, we'll take the $218,000 and then apply a 0.75 factor to allow for taxes, etc., leaving us with $163,500.

As to the debt, we can only estimate because of the ranges involved. Wilson and his spokesman did themselves no favors by not answering questions

Let's take the $325,000 as short term debt (personal loans and credit card along with the home equity loan, though that could as easily be long term). The credit card is included because we don't know if he's paying that off, so we'll assume the worst.

We'll go with the maximum $1.25 million for long term.

We have to guess on the rates and durations. For short term, let's start with a rate of 10% and an eight-year term. One loan already goes back to 1999, and several others are at the eight-year mark now. If you take the potentially onerous cost of credit card debt versus the lower cost of personal loans, a blended 10% seems reasonable.

For long term, we'll be really conservative and say 15 years at 6.5 percent.

What we get (all figures are for the year):
Short term (8 years, 10%), current portion due $59,184
Long term (15 years, 6.5%), current portion due $130,666
Total: $189,850, or a shortfall against income ($163,500) of $26,350.

That would indicate some pressure, but perhaps none at all if the partnership income were included and much less if we even took more than $5,000 of that rental income range that the article dos include.

(You can try these calculations yourself at http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/loan-calculator.aspx)

But there are wide variations with just some small adjustments in amount, term or rate. Leaving the short- and long-term maximums, but varying the interest and duration for the short term to eight years and 5% narrows the gap to $16,546. Some others:

10 years, 10% = $18,706 gap
10 years, 5% = $8,542 gap

Just to show how sensitive this is, however, let's take the mean short-term indebtedness of $245,000 (again,  leaving the current portion of long-term debt at $130,666).

8 years, 10% = $11,782 gap
8 years, 5% = $4,390 gap
10 years, 10% = $6,022 gap
10 years, 5% = $1,646 to the good

None of these gaps is particularly onerous if the assets can be converted to cover. But if we then adjust the long-term debt by increasing the maturity to 20 years, that payment drops by more than $18,000 a year, and almost all the scenarios are in the black.(Make it a 30-year loan and the payment drops by almost $36,000 a year, moving about everything into the black.)

If we lower the long-term indebtedness to the $1.17 million mean of the range, the total per year for that portion drops to $122,292 at 15 years, $104,676 at 20 and $88,752 at 30.

The last problem in the article is any lack of a longitudinal perspective. In fact, Wilson's worst-case asset-liability gap has dropped from $978,000 in the 2008 report to $323,000 last year. His best case situation went from a $1.15 million surplus in 2008 to more than  $1.9 million in the most recent report.

I don't expect a long analysis like this in the paper. But we are entitled to something more than trying to make false associations on limited data. The reporting could have been better, but the editing was far short of the mark, especially the headline (in The State).

Pay Walls: Times of London tops 100K subs

So is the Times of London's much-derided pay wall strategy working?

If you look at the latest figures from Paid Content, the answer seems to be - maybe. The number of subscribers had topped 100,000, equating to about $1.4 million a month. Still a pittance when measured against the paper's larger circulation, but something to think about.

Hyperlocal: InJersey autopsy

With Gannett closing its InJersey hyperlocal sites this week, there is a good autopsy in StreetFight that you should read.

Written by Ted Mann, Gannett's New Jersey digital development director, it's one of those rare assessments that is neither shrouded in black nor shaded by rose-colored glasses. It's pretty much just the cold, hard facts (OK, with a little hopefulness thrown in).

Some of the things I thought were interesting:

• News maps are eye-candy, not much else. As Mann says, that might change as geolocative and mobile are more integrated, but for now, no one seems to be clicking on them. I still think such visual representations might be the best way to present some individual stories especially when location is a key (I still go back to my July Fourth map of parades, fireworks, etc., instead of a river of text), but this does add a dose of reality to the mix.
• Aggregation and syndication are NOT the way to build viable hyperlocal sites. I and others have said it, but let's let Mann say it: It was almost immediately apparent that we’d ripped the soul out of the sites, and they quickly became ghost towns.
•  Flashy content management systems don't matter. You can build a good site on the cheap. But it has to have content and features people want. InJersey used WordPress and BuddyPress. (This is reinforced from my own experience with Hartsville Today. The CMS doesn't matter, but the features and ease of use do. When Media General ditched Drupal and moved the site to Expression Engine, but without using any of the EE plug-ins so that it became just a glorified message board without the ease of associating pictures with posts, an online calendar, a list of recent posts and comments, etc., the site lost users in droves, and they said that was exactly why. (To the credit of a developer at one of MG's papers, some of that functionality was restored, but too late and not the calendar, which effectively migrated to Facebook.).)
• Modesty is the best quality when it comes to expectations of growing audience (which is why - my comment here - hyperlocal sites and large media chains simply may not mix). Mann says the 17 sites had 2,259 members and 90 regular contributors. One of the sites had 65,000 pageviews in a month (he doesn't break out others, though in a Poynter piece he says some others had only a few thousand). Those of us in the trenches might rejoice at some of those numbers, but they are not enough inside a big organization that is looking for profitability and cash flow and measures audience in numbers far larger.
• Banner ads couldn't support the site. No surprise there, but the debate will continue. Mann references Howard Owens, a friend of mine, who does seem to have success with The Batavian.
• If you build it, they won't come - at least if it means doing any work. We all know this, but Mann's postmortem reflects it. See the 90 regular contributors above out of 2,259 members, or 4%. And, yes, there was a self-serve ad platform, but as Mann notes: [T]here was definitely an appetite among local advertisers to support the kind of reporting and coverage we were providing. Still loved using Flyerboard, we just had to sell them, create the ads, and schedule it all ourselves.
• People staffing the sites need to live in the communities. Many of the Gannett journalists did not.

There are some other good points, too. As I said, well worth reading. There are holes to be poked and points to be debated and, as they say, your results may differ, but overall it's a good assessment that should be useful going forward.