Headlines and prepositions

My friend and very talented designer, Ed Henniger, has a rant up complaining about seeing headlines ending their first lines with prepositions and articles.

This is one of those things that, while once considered a sign of good craft, has become largely a non-issue on most publications.

My note back to Ed:

Sorry, Ed, but it's long ago been declared a nonissue on most desks and at ACES. And readers' panels at ACES through which we tested headlines made clear it was not an issue to them. As one woman pointedly said when questioned rather severely from an audience member: "You really lose sleep over that?"

I remind folks of it as craft the first couple of times, but I don't push it anymore.

Time to declare it a shibboleth and move on.

It's especially true in an era when headlines often have to do double duty in print and online -- where how it is displayed is a function of many things, including window size.

 I know this will be a hard one to swallow in some quarters, but there are far more important things to worry about these days. Nothing we have indicates any reduction in comprehension.

Why I love ACES meetings

I've been absent for two years from the annual gatherings of the American Copy Editors Society. I missed them. I'd forgotten how much till I was able to make it again this year to the gathering in St. Louis.

It's about meeting old friends - and some of them former co-workers - like John McIntyre, Bill Cloud, Wayne Countryman, Joyce Laskowski, Vicki Krueger, David Sullivan, Rich Holden (great to have him back from bypass surgery), Merrill Perlman, Doug Ward, Nicole Stockdale, Fred Vultee ... and too many others to mention.

And finally getting to meet others who have been kindred spirits over the digital divide, like Ruth Thaler-Carter (and having a great lunch).

It's about great sessions, like the annual AP lovefest and seeing my old friend and former colleague Darrell Christian. Or how to make copy readable without making it stupid.

There's listening to a former editor of Hustler - yeah, we concentrated on the text errors as he flashed various examples on the screen (trust me, the other stuff was very tastefully redacted).

There's sharing stories with others in the trenches, especially the academic trenches, about teaching editing and writing and dealing with plagiarism and fabrication. I always come away with new ideas as well as the realization we all are seeing the same thing: students who are great hunter-gatherers if the information prey is on the surface in front of them but who have trouble connecting the dots (or, continuing the bad metaphor, aren't great farmers in making things grow). It's compounded by watching more students increasingly struggle to read things quickly and critically. (I do miss the lunches that we "profs" used to have at these meetings and hope we can resume them.)

There's the great conversation about Southern politics with the guy next to me at dinner.

Followed by a great talk by Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster. Yes, people do read the dictionary, and the online stats show it. Some fascinating things. For instance, what are the most looked-up words? Affect and effect. So don't feel bad, dear student. As I've said many times, look it up (grin).

(And the reminder from Bill Walsh that sentence fragments like those in the previous graf are fine if used sparingly and artfully.)

There is great food. And there are great views.

And there's the reminder that I need to push some of our students more to apply for ACES scholarships. (Yeah, you who are going to that North Carolina city for an editing internship - I'm talkin' about you. My bad for not pushing it more. Expect to get pushed for next year when I get back. Next year's application is already online.)

And most of all there is satisfaction and pride.

• Satisfaction that the reality Nicole and I predicted has come true from when we did those blogging and SEO for editors sessions back in Los Angeles and Miami and Cleveland (and when I went solo in Denver), and people were crowding the room but also were looking at us like we had three eyes and were lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks. I don't mean smug satisfaction -- we admittedly were out on the high wire and, like everyone else at that time, were making it up as we went. And I remember being almost jumped at the general session in Denver when I got up and suggested ACES needed to start broadening from its newspaper-centric view.
• Pride that ACES has matured, expanded and embraced the digital age and the wide range of editing arts full bore. Yes, some of it was born of necessity, mixed with a bit of panic as ACES saw its ranks thin as newsrooms went through wholesale cuts, centralization (or elimination) of editing, etc. But the measure of a person or organization is not necessarily the motivation, but how they (yes, they -- it's not wrong to use it there) respond. And by that measure, ACES has truly risen to the challenge and found its stride and its strength. And while it still remains too hidden (including, Sokolowski acknowledged, to him), and while editors still too often are seen as nit-pickers and grammar grunts, neither of which has ever been true of those who truly practice the craft, knowing that ACES continues to strengthen is great -- because I plan on attending these for a few more years at least.

Congrats on another great meeting.

Best line seen at the meeting on a T-shirt (paraphrased from memory): How does a copy editor comfort a struggling writer? Just walk over and whisper "they're, there, their."

On to Las Vegas.

AP Style: 'Underway" and numerals

I'm going to take a bow here - AP FINALLY is making two changes I have urged for years. Revealed today at the ACES convention in St. Louis:

underway - Now one word in all uses. Editor-at-Large Darrell Christian says it's to conform to the dictionary. Frankly, AP was being outflanked by even common usage in newspapers. This follows last year's change of "work force" to "workforce."


Numerals - The entry will now be consolidated and expanded in an attempt, as Christian said, to bring things all together and simplify while not sending people hither and yon through the stylebook looking for variations. It will be about four pages long. (David Minthorn noted there were several hundred related possible entries.)

One wrinkle on this - all distances will now be figures. So you no longer need to distinguish between dimensions and distances. The pipe was 3 feet long (dimension) and now he ran 4 miles or the town was 6 square miles.

In a way, however, the AP is complicating things a bit here - why not also take on the duration versus age dichotomy and use all figures there? He is 5 years old -- as it is now -- but why not also he was sentenced to 5 years' probation?

I've urged for some time that the AP simplify its arcane numeral entries. My suggestion was to spell out everything between one and nine unless a dollar sign or something similar preceded it. It works fine for the Wall Street Journal, for instance.

But if the digital -- and especially the mobile -- age requires shortening and figures, I'm fine with that too -- just do it across the board.

And here's another:
Moped: Now one word, not that awkward "mo-ped" that so many ignored anyhow. Did anyone really think that in context people would think it meant wandering around listlessly?

AP's David Minthorn repeatedly says the stylebook is "coming into compliance with the dictionary." So, AP, maybe it's also time to consider changing dictionaries. Webster's New World College 4th (when will we get a 5th - it was supposed to be this spring) is the more conservative -- and, frankly, the most out of step, of the three majors. Merriam-Webster still has its haters as too liberal. So why not American Heritage 5? It has the benefit of much better explanations than Webster's of the reasoning behind lots of its entries.

So will AP also change "gantlet/gauntlet" to favor gauntlet (run the gauntlet) as M-W and AH do?

Get your AP Stylebook T-shirts while they're hot

AP Stylebook T-shirts (and you'd better get that right, not t-shirts or tee-shirts {grin}).

Definitely should be in the pile of holiday packages for every copy editor.

ACES should include one in the goodie bag for everyone that goes to its New Orleans meeting in April.

Love the slogan: "We wrote the book on style. Edited it, too."

AP Style - technology marches on - email, cellphone, smartphone

Last year at the American Copy Editors Society meeting, AP announced it was following the crowd, giving up its stubborn insistence on Web site and henceforth going with website.

Today, with ACES in session in Phoenix, AP announces it is going with the flow again and making cellphone and smartphone one word and dropping the hyphen from email.

AP also is adopting handheld, one word, for the noun (though I hope the use of that jargonish term will be rare) while hand-held, the preferred dictionary spelling, stays for the adjective.

Who knows? If this keeps up we might yet get "workforce" and "underway," as most of the rest of the universe now does it.

In another change not yet from AP, but I see posted on the ACES convention site, AP is adopting Kolkata, instead of Calcutta, for the Indian city.

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Update: The backlash, such as it is, already has begun on Twitter at #teamhyphen

A bit more from the meeting: Nick Jungman reports AP is abandoning its short-lived idea (from last year) to spell out state names in datelines.

Buttry: Time to weigh the value of clean copy

Steve Buttry, former copy editor, trainer for the American Press Institute, editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, and now director of community engagement for TBD.com, weighs in on balancing the value of clean copy to today's digital realities.

To summarize (but you should read his entire post because a summary never adequately picks up the nunances) and my thoughts (in italics):

• "But as someone working on journalism innovation, I know that costs and value propositions are a critical factor in financial success and even survival." Yes, and much of this falls at the feet of copy editors. I still haven't seen them make an effective cost/value argument in the language executives use: Dollars and cents. In some quarters, I still sense a sense of fantasy - a fantasy that somehow there will be a massive lawsuit somewhere that will make "the industry" stand up and notice. Not going to happen.
• "My first newspaper had no copy desk and it was nowhere near as good as the Register, but it was good enough. ...I knew the city editor was just going to give my copy a quick glance, so I had to take responsibility for the quality of my copy, and I made it pretty good." "Good enough" still scares me as a standard because I don't know what it means. "Perfection" also scares me because it is a) not attainable and b) as a result tends to lead to paralysis. But striving for a level of perfection seems to be a useful glide slope if we are wise enough to know when the slope is too steep. But Buttry's ultimate point here that we MUST inculcate in all staff that editing is now everyone's responsibility is well-taken.
• "We have no copy editors at TBD (and got criticized for that after a famous correction). While the newsroom staffing was Editor Erik Wemple’s decision, I fully support it. You can’t do everything, and a digital operation can correct after publication with less damage than a print publication (very few people saw the original error that we were correcting; it was the correction that went viral)." Too facile. That original error is likely to be cached somewhere, and even with "very few" (please define - hundreds, a few thousand?), the network effects power means it still can get into the digital bloodstream. Errors have long tails just as much as corrected copy does. Yes, I agree we have to rethink - the digital environment is more plastic than print. But there are some realities that the "we can correct it quickly and few will notice" camp also conveniently overlooks. To TBD's credit, the correction is prominently displayed, something you are less likely to find elsewhere. 
• "Erik gave everyone a writing test in the interview, so we could see their raw copy. You do need to screen for copy quality. If copy editing resources can’t be what they used to be, then maybe you can no longer afford that staff member who’s a good reporter but a mediocre (or even bad) writer. Or even a good writer but a lousy speller. (Or you need to demand that they get better and start compensating for the weaknesses they know they have.)" Amen. Unfortunately, in most newsrooms it's not the case, with reporting and content creation valued far more than the integrated writing/editing skills. Dan Conover even has made a case that journalism's future lies more in a data-intensive model that should value reporting at least equally if not more than writing/editing. As he puts it: "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."
• "Quality has always been a relative matter, with publications deciding how much they could afford to spend in pursuit of unattainable perfection. I hope the value equation continues to support copy editors at most operations, but that’s a decision individual editors, publishers and group presidents will have to make with their budgets, their value equations and their communities." See my above comments about perfection and groups like ACES yet to make the value proposition.
• "Here’s a practical question: Has the chain consolidated editing functions? That’s not as good a solution, in terms of quality, as having copy editors at each location. But if an organization doesn’t have or can’t afford quality editing at each location, consolidation might provide better, more efficient editing and design." If you define editing as "production," this makes absolute sense, and that's where copy editors failed to see their blindside. They assumed they were all about "quality," a squishy, largely unmeasurable term. Their bosses saw them as "production," a very measurable cost. If editing/copy editing is to find a new equilibrium in the digital age, editors are going to have to rethink how to reframe the quality argument.
• "Another thing to consider is whether an organization is spending too much time editing wire copy. I know local copy editors add value when they edit wire copy, having done it myself. I also know that wire copy has already been edited by professional copy editors. The local editing can and should be cut back or nearly eliminated. Or certainly wire editing could be consolidated among affiliated newspapers." I was a wire-service correspondent and later editor. Trust me, consolidate the editing, but don't abandon it.
• The truth is that grammar and editing skills are declining in the population and among journalists. Newspapers are in a difficult spot. Readers are older and learned grammar in a different era when it got greater emphasis (though you’d be amazed how many arrogant, critical letters I received from readers, taking us to task for our errors but containing errors of their own). But many staff members are young people who grew up txting “lol, omg” and the like." Newspapers have always been in a difficult spot - how much to follow and how much to lead. That's why you had editors. I'm unclear what Steve is trying to say here - abandon ship because grammar and editing skills are declining overall - or take a more measured approach and try to lead more? What is the role of media in all this? I tend to favor a leadership role because what I hear from others in the business community outside of media is a great wail about declining language skills. So it would seem there is some value proposition in this. If you have any doubt that business does and will influence things, consider the language/writing changes in the SAT. (And here's a quiz question - find at least one language error in that article I linked to - hint, look for the apostrophe misused to make a plural.)
• "Anyway, I think in today’s value analysis, clean copy (especially AP style) isn’t as valuable as it used to be (or has been surpassed in value by some other factors). As an editor, I did occasionally field calls from people complaining about grammar and spelling, but never about AP style." Why do these things always come down to the straw man of AP style? I agree with Buttry - people who obsess about AP style need to get a life (click on the "style-AP" tag below to see some of my suggestions for removing some of AP's inanities). On the other hand, many publications, not just newspapers, still use it as a unifying element (you want to talk about inefficiency, especially with consolidated editing, try dealing with multiple styles - local variations are bad enough). So for now, in j-school, we probably are still obligated to teach some style (just as we have to teach APA, MLA and Chicago, if those writers are doing academic papers - style is just a fact of publication), but teach it in a balanced, enlightened way, not one that turns people into style enforcers.

My bottom line here: Buttry's post is valuable for again highlighting the modern realities and issues surrounding editing and the need to develop its value proposition and not just bemoan "quality." But it's too facile in some areas, as much of this discussion tends to be. I can't make the ACES meeting in Phoenix this year (I have to be at the AEJMC Southeast Colloquium the same weekend), but I'd use Buttry's as the centerpiece around which to start a serious conversation about where editing goes. So far, most of what I've seen are editors hanging on for dear life, along for the ride, not trying to really take charge of what they can about their futures.

And editing educators should have the same conversation - continually.

(Disclaimer - I have no editor on this post, so there probably are some errors. I'm happy to correct them if you point them out.)
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Update: One might also consider this article from across the pond by Allan Prosser commenting on some of the editing cutbacks and rearrangements there. Not only does he manage to get in "Gadarene," he has this wonderful quote from his boss when he asked for a pay raise for handling the especially difficult copy from a star reporter: “His job is to provide the words, but your function is to provide the music. Now piss off.”

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.)

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.

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.

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

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. 

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 Editor's Lament - the video

I've been remiss in getting this up ---
Christopher Ave, who recorded Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song) has now produced a music video. Bittersweet, to be sure - and it isn't quite MTV (hey, these are copy editors!). But let's all give it a boost in the YouTube ratings.

ACES Scholarships

Hard to believe given the drumbeat of news, but there is still money in copy editing, especially if you're a college student. It comes from the ACES Education Fund, an affiliate of the American Copy Editors Society

The skinny

• Deadline Nov. 15
• Juniors, seniors and grad students interested in careers in copy editing.
• Students graduating in 2009 and who have or will have full-time copy editing jobs or internships are also eligible.
  
• Among the criteria used by judges are commitment to copy editing as a career, work experience in copy editing and abilities in copy editing, as demonstrated by examples and recommendations.
• The big prize: the $2,500 Aubespin scholarship, named for Merv Aubespin, a longtime journalist, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists and the “godfather” of ACES.
• At least four other candidates get $1,000 each. All the winners will be granted free registration for the ACES national conference in April 2010 in Philadelphia.
  

Full details http://www.facebook.com/l/b89db;www.copydesk.org/scholarships.htm or
http://www.copydesk.org/scholarships.htm

Questions? Contact ACES Education Fund secretary Kathy Schenck, kschenck@journalsentinel.com.

Stupid Layoffs

Add this one to the list -- Brian Throckmorton, copy chief at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald Leader.

Brian has been one of the leaders in the word business - thoughtful, insightful, fun to be around and always a great seminar to attend at ACES.

The gutting of the industry continues. May it rest in peace.

Just as I feared, dammit

Have had my nose buried in grading and getting senior semester copy prepared all week as we close the semester, so I had this really, really bad feeling after seeing the news that The Baltimore Sun had cut a third of its newsroom -- 61 positions.

So I guess I was not surprised when I went to John McIntyre's blog this morning, just po'd. John, the AME of desks at the Sun and a good friend, was among those cut.

The Sun's ax fell heavily on management positions - 21 according to the various stories -- with the object being to keep reporters and reposition as a Web-heavy, social media, online-first operation. Good enough

But not good.

McIntyre was one of the good -- really good - guys in this business, someone who cares for language, accuracy and, above all, journalism. And beyond that, a gentleman above all else. As usual, he made his exit on his Sun blog with class.

He is a former president of the American Copy Editors Society, and so perhaps it's eerily fitting that this happens in the same week ACES is gathering in -- or rather straggling into (BTW, I recommend David Sullivan's post for so many more reasons than that little aside) -- Minneapolis, its future and that of many of its members far from clear.

For me, this goes beyond "newspapering" or "news" or "journalism" or whatever we want to call it today. It's a bit of a death in the family -- the family of folks I have come to know as friends and colleagues who care deeply about language and journalism & etc.

Oh sure, McIntyre isn't dead, and he promises to be blogging elsewhere. That seems to be the phrase of the age, doesn't it -- see you on the blog - somewhere else. I'll be sure to link. But it's unfortunate it probably won't be at the Sun. The "paper" could use the digital "juice."

Update: John's new blog is http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/
Columnist Laura Vozzella has a column lamenting John's leaving and praising his work: Last seen in a bow tie, columnist's dictionary goes missing.
----

The best line of the 80+ comments on his blog lamenting John's leaving comes from one Mark Murphy: Hearing that a newspaper has laid off John McIntyre is like hearing that Noah has laid off the one crew member who knows the most about caulking.

'Copy Editors Lament'

Christopher Ave, political editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, may be my new hero - he has written and recorded a musical elegy to copy editors.

Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song) is a catchy, bittersweet comment on the craft and the skill that you simply must listen to. A sample:

Copy Editor's Lament (The Layoff Song)
By Christopher Ave

I'm a human safety net
I double-check the facts and vet
assertions before they are set in type.

I can provide punctuation
appropriate for publication
make the capitalization right.

I was there to fix your grammar
when you thought it wouldn't matter
cut all your extraneous blather down.

AP stylebook is my bible
helped me stop the suit for libel
but nothing ensures my survival now.

And I don't know what I'll do
after I am through
killing my last adjective ...

Listen to the MP3 (or the WAV file that Ave has also provided). I suggest ACES get Ave's permission to make it the theme at the upcoming Minneapolis meeting.

By the way, it is not lost on me that in many ways this song also politely but firmly lampoons some of the silliness that is part of copy editing, too -- the inflexibility, the shibboleths, the slavish clinging to style even when it clearly gets in the way. Still, while the times may be bittersweet, my friends, as long as we can sing about it, it can't be all bad.

Register for the ACES-Southeast meeting Jan .25

It's time to register for the ACES-Southeast meeting Jan. 25 at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

We have a great program planned, with tracks dealing with traditional issues but also with new ones of the digital age.

Our midday speaker is Van King, longtime journalist and former publisher in Greensboro who is now leading creation of a journalism program at Queens University in Charlotte.

The program is being held jointly with the help of the S.C. Press Association.

You'll find the registration form at http://www.scpress.org/Documents/ACES.pdf

Please join us and get your registration in as soon as possible.