We're all going to hell in a dictionary

Well, not really. But as usual, the "Scream" crowd is emerging over the latest crop of neologisms to enter the dictionaries (here's Oxford's August list). (Though there is a nagging suspicion in reading this that it may be unnecessarily shrill just to get page views.)


And, as usual, John McIntyre launches a well-placed missile right to the middle of the pomposity and silliness.

One is often reminded of the quote by Samuel Johnson, considered father of the modern dictionary.

Let the weekend begin ...

What he said ... John McIntyre's first-day-of-class speech

John McIntyre, whom I am proud to call a friend, has posted the first-day "welcome" he gives to editing students.

I suspect versions of this will be showing up in classrooms across the nation - maybe the world :)

This is not a gut course. Writing is difficult enough to do. It does not come to us as naturally as speech, and we have to spend years learning it. Editing is even harder. We can write intuitively, by ear, but we have to edit analytically.


Before we even get to the analytical aspect, we will have to do some work on grammar and usage, because if you are like most of the five hundred students who have preceded you here, you will be shaky on some of the fundamentals. You will have to learn some things that you ought to have been taught, and you will have to unlearn some things that you ought not to have been taught


I should also caution you from the outset that this course is appallingly dull. A student from last term complained in the course evaluation that “he just did the same thing over and over day after day.” So will you. Editing must be done word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and we will go over texts in class, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. No one will hear you if you scream.


I’m going to turn my back for a minute so that anyone who wants to bolt can.
Now, if you are willing to stay—and work—I can show you how it is done.

 There's more good stuff, but you really can't get the full flavor until you know John's somewhat patrician speech pattern - so check this out first.

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.)

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.

Quick Hits

Random thoughts from a Tuesday morning:

• John McIntyre, who runs the desks at the Baltimore Sun and has taught us on his blog how to tie a tie, fold a pocket handkerchief and make a martini, finds himself the subject of a Christian Science Monitor article on copy editing.
• Bloglines Beta rocks. I especially like the quick view that shows all the feeds in a folder at once.
• Read Tom Grubisich's analysis of local news sites over on Robert Niles' Sensible Talk. Grubisich does a nice job of skewering sites like Topix and OnLocal, which I also don't find all that useful (disclosure, we do pick up the Hartsville Topix feed on HartsvilleToday just because Topix does grab news from the Florence area). Follow the links at the bottom to the other stories on the "Cracking the Local Market" topic. Tom Noonan's is especially noteworthy if for no other reason than he hits on cookie-cutter Web sites, which I think are just death in the local-local market. (The one is almost a month old. It's been sitting in my "to do" pile. Sorry for the delay.)
• Just finished reading the Quill's SPJ national awards issue, and I don't care what people say about "writing to awards." After I get done I always feel inspired, not only to go out and do better journalism but with the reassurance that lots of great journalism is being done. The unfortunate part, to me, is that in today's media cacaphony, too much of it doesn't get the respect it deserves.
  

Steve Outing has opened a can of worms with his open letter to the founder of Craigslist suggesting ways the free classified site and newspapers might cooperate -- the goal being to sustain newspapers until we can figure out what comes next. The responses are fairly predictable, with a big dose of "newspapers have brought it on themselves with their sloth, so let 'em stew." There's a kernel of truth there. The only thing I have to add to the conversation, though, is wondering whether the innovation the industry needed could have taken place simply because of the industry's structure.

Remember, newspapers were largely individual or family owned proprietorships well into the last century. Now, not minimizing the industry's absolute pitiful record of any kind of change, the reality also was that a publication's or small chain's idiosyncrasies were often prized, not just by the owners but, in a kind of tut-tut fashion, by the communities they served. Nowhere was this more evident than in the long, slow grind to establishing the Standard Advertising Unit (see 1981 NYT article abstract and obit of its designer, Frank Savino) and the complaints for decades by national advertisers about how difficult it was to buy across markets.

Fast forward to the digital age. Papers have consolidated into chains -- but don't let that fool you. The majority of papers are still owned by individuals or families. The chains, of course, have never heard of the letters R&D, and for that they should be suitably censured. But the idiosyncrasy factor is still at work; even inside chains, most papers are left to their own devices as long as they pump out the necessary profits. Under those conditions, how much innovation can we really expect? Sharing is a dirty word, and the myriad publishing systems, etc., make it unlikely an innovation could be scaled to the point where it would do the "industry" much good. (Case in point, the Lawrence Journal-World, one of the most innovative newsrooms, but generally not emulated elsewhere.)

None of this is meant as an apology for an industry that positively has sucked at innovation. It's just worth noting, I think, that from their birth, newspapers evolved into an industry almost doomed to failure, and industry structure may have been a significant contributing factor.

Bottoms up - A refreshing McIntyre

John McIntyre, head of desks at the Baltimore Sun, continues to prove that copy editors, indeed, are multitaskers.

First it was the video on tying a tie, then on the proper gentleman's way to display a pocket handkerchief.

His latest video on his blog is the proper way to make a martini -- stirred, not shaken!

OMG, I can see the words "local icon" already slipping into the profiles and obituaries.

Funny, he never says how many takes it took to shoot that little film ... cin cin.

(My only quibble is that the dang video, once it runs its course, automatically slops over into some other one that has nothing to do with this. I wish papers would disable auto-start and auto-rollover.) Fixed. But I still think they should remove the auto-start option from any newspaper video software.