headsup: the blog

Super-de-dooper-de ... oh, forget it

2012-01-23T23:20:00.000-05:00

A suggestion for our friends on the fog-shrouded island and its environs? Next time the first thing pops into your mind, hedwise, wait for the second thing to pop into your mind.

You'll be glad you did.

Colege is good

2012-01-19T19:33:00.000-05:00

For a lot of reasons, not least of which is Your Editor's own typographic ineptitude, this is an editing blog, not a catalog of typos and one-off misspellings. Still, the occasional isolated goof is highlighted, if only to remind copy editors: Please pay extra attention to spelling when Star Columnist is demanding that education be universally recognized as Job One.

Not really. At least, not if they have a clue

2012-01-16T21:27:00.001-05:00

Sigh:

The first interviews of survivors — and the first impressions of people around the world — of the Costa Concordia cruise liner that ran aground and tipped over in Italy are yielding predictable comparisons to another tragedy.

Let's see. Did it stab its royal benefactor because it misinterpreted some shop talk among the local witches? Is it plotting to kill its stepfather on the advice of its ectoplasmic dad? Or are we getting tragedies and accidents confused again? Because on the scale of technological accidents, a death count of five (at this reading) is pretty low-bore. I don't mean to minimize the deaths, but I do wish someone -- the AP is an ideal candidate -- would minimize the stupid comparisons.

... It seems the world views the Concordia through a prism of fact, myth and fantasy that surrounds the Titanic, largely because of the popular 1997 movie.

It may be that "first impressions of people around the world" are bound up in the AP's burst of pop-culture fantasy. (If there's some evidence to support those two claims about "the world," now would be a good time to bring it forth.) Should that be the case, it might be nice if the first instinct of journalists was to debunk such comparisons, rather than ...

... “It looked like it was sheer panic on the Concordia,” said Tom Keill, a Pennsylvania tourist who took in the “Titanic the Experience” tour yesterday morning in Orlando.

Keill said his two young sons are “really into” Titanic history, which is why the family visited the exhibit while on vacation. The exhibit includes artifacts and replicas of the famed ship.

“When I saw the Concordia on the news this morning, this is what I thought about,” Keill said.

Ah, to see the world in a grain of sand. Failing such auguries of innocence, could we at least stay away from seeing the world in one tourist family from Pennsylvania? Anyway, take a deep breath, because we're about to descend into another layer of stupidity:

... Both had issues with their christening, and believers in superstition might attribute the ships’ tragedies to it.

Before a ship’s maiden voyage, it’s common for a dignitary to “christen” the vessel by breaking a bottle of champagne on the hull for good luck.

The Titanic was never christened. The Concordia was christened during a ceremony when the ship came online, but the champagne bottle never broke. After each tragedy, people wondered whether the lack of a proper christening was a bad omen.

For one thing, it would be nice to think that someone at the AP had looked up the verb "christen" and gained a rough idea of its meaning. But for a larger thing -- if there is a point to journalism, doesn't it at some point require that "believers in superstition" shut up while the empirical world is being discussed?

Granted, the AP wrote a stupid story, but it didn't order its story at gunpoint onto anyone's front page. The fault shown above lies with the newspaper in question, which could have run a genuine news story about this disaster but instead (a) chose a chunk of ineptly composed cultural nonsense and (b) placed same on the front page.

How nice a world it would be if the AP cut down on the amount of mythological nonsense it chose to clog the wires with. Perhaps we'll get there sooner if more AP member papers decide to spike those stories, rather than granting them frontpage play.

Wait til you see those bats

2012-01-15T18:18:00.002-05:00

Some ledes are so awe-inspiring that all you can do is, oh, sit around and think of ways to repunctuate them. Or read them in the voices of various actors in great roles -- say, Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now":

Jesus Christ. The auto show.

You can enjoy the whole thing yourself, and I don't think we'd be spoiling dinner to skip to the conclusion:

And because I went straight from the DIA to Cobo, I couldn't help asking myself, "What would Jesus drive?"

I don't know. But I bet it'd have a chalice holder.

He could have carried that one a little farther, you think?

You know, Abbott, those biblical cars sure have funny names these days.

Tell me a couple, so when I get to the auto show, I know who is driving what.

Well, Jesus drives a Saturn. And Mary drives a Mercury.

Yeah? What does Pontius Pilate drive?

Nails!*

They'll be here all week, folks. Don't forget your server!

* Punch line courtesy of operative "Natasha."

Williams. Vaughan Williams.

2012-01-14T19:55:00.001-05:00

I've been using a "Luther King" hed from the Times for a couple years now to illustrate the hazards of random style guesses. Observations from closer at hand are welcome, but what I expect is happening is that the subs are taking a handy shortcut: Anybody who uses three names on first reference uses the last two on second reference.

The hed has since been tweaked (it's now "King statue quote 'to be changed'," with the claim quotes intact), and the story appears to have been updated recently, so I can't tell if the original text also used "King" for "Martin Luther King" on second reference. Still, it's a useful reminder of how easy it is to put a foot wrong in a shortcut.

First, do no harm

2012-01-13T10:10:00.001-05:00

(edited)
Pending clarification (per Jan's comment below) on which version actually came first, we ask whether this is a case of aid and comfort to the enemy in the Global War on Editing:

Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. (Nation's Newspaper of Record:)

Other rent-seeking groups are disbursed across the political spectrum. (Foremost Newspaper of the Carolinas)

David Brooks is a cartoonishly bad writer, true. But even an odious heap of freshly composted George Will like this column shouldn't have its shoelaces tied together in the editing process.

I'll have the chicken tartare

2012-01-08T11:01:00.000-05:00

Even at the Nation's Newspaper of Record, idle hands are Satan's maracas:

Because of an editing error, a review in some editions last Sunday about Polpettina, a restaurant in Eastchester, N.Y., described a chicken entree incorrectly. It is half of a roasted chicken, not a “half-roasted” chicken.

Here's the offending sentence from the original lede:

It's a pizzeria at heart, but what turns heads are the sparkling salads, the way-above-average pasta dishes, a profoundly good half-roasted chicken, and trimly tailored desserts.

... and the perfectly good substitute you see today:

It’s a pizzeria at heart, but what turns heads are the sparkling salads, the way-above-average pasta dishes, a profoundly good roasted chicken half, and trimly tailored desserts.

Allow us a guess here: The writer turned in a lede that used the fairly common (and hardly ungrammatical) menu and cooking term "half roasted chicken." Working on autopilot, some editor saw two modifiers together and assumed they were a compound, rather than a sequence, and our review is suddenly much more interesting to the Health Department than once it was.

This isn't a case of too many rules or too few rules. (There really is a difference between a man eating blancmange and a man-eating blancmange.) Over and above sheer carelessness, it's a case of misusing time by misreading potential ambiguity; did this clause really need the editor's intervention? On the one hand, you can argue that any reader who's ready to wade into the adjectival thicket of a Times restaurant review knows full well what a "half roasted chicken" is; on the other, that the occasional daywalking civilian bystander might still be confused by the elliptical construction, so better to make it "roasted half chicken" or "roasted chicken half."

Editors still need to start by asking what the prose says. Having found a potential fault, though, a reasonable follow-on question is "how ambiguous is ambiguous?" As John McIntyre pointed out last week, English ain't algebra; relying on math tricks to settle questions of grammar is a dangerous game. (But see especially Ed Latham's contribution in the comments on how legal writing addresses the potential ambiguity of "which" and "that" in relative clauses.) One of the first editing rules we'll cover this semester is "Sit on your hands until you know what the writer is trying to do."

Cases like this aren't casualties of the War on Editing, but the war reminds us that we work in an environment where the value of editing is no longer assumed but often actively challenged. We don't help matters when the customer orders roast chicken and we substitute chicken tartare.

If that's the kind of party it's going to be ...

2012-01-06T23:44:00.006-05:00

By now, you've probably seen the "herniated dick" story. If so, you've probably also seen the paper's explanation*:

The box was edited by an experienced copy editor, the reporter's first line of defense, and moved along in the production process as written.

The next stop was a final read by a second editor, another experienced employee who recognized that "herniated disc" doesn't conform to the newspaper's style for that type of injury, and that it should be "herniated disk." That editor tried to type in the correction, but ended up with an unfortunate typo.

Credit to the paper for openness -- and for posting an image of the error itself, which you see above. (That takes, um, bodily parts.) To which I'd like to add a few points:

1) Two-kinds-of-people-wise, there are two kinds of editors: those who will admit how badly they've screwed up somebody else's copy at some point or another, and those who won't. Want one of mine? Slotting an obit on a not-much-busier-than-usual night at the same paper some years ago, I turned a "fireman" (in the put-her-into-Spencer-on-time sense) into a "firefighter." So I'm almost as sympathetic for the unnamed editor as for the reporter -- almost, because the reporter had to deal with layers of people who have no idea how much damage can happen to your prose after you leave the building.**
2) This isn't a casualty of the War on Editing. Errors of this sort have always been with us. They come about not because we're in a hurry, but because we look at the wrong stuff when we're in a hurry. And that leads to ...
3) What does the "newspaper's style" actually call for here? I don't know if the Observer has a mandate, but here's the relevant AP entry:

disc, disk Use the disc spelling for phonograph records and related terms (disc jockey), optical and laser-based devices (a Blu-ray Disc) and for disc brake. Use disk for computer-related references and medical references, such as a slipped disk.

Let's see if we have this straight here. If I want to celebrate Earl Scruggs's birthday by playing "Foggy Mountain Banjo" at truly cat-intimidating volumes, I'd put the FMB disc*** into the stereo. But if it goes into the laptop, it's a disk? That's not just a distinction without a difference, it's a distinction without a clue.

One of the genuinely important things that stylebooks do is keep a catalog of preferences. English is promiscuous about spelling. Adviser and advisor, disk and disc, worshipped and worshiped are all legitimate in the eyes of the Lord amen, but if you want your publication to sound the same from story to story and page to page, pick one and tell your staff to use it:

disc, disk You can do whatever you want on your own time, but when you're in uniform and on the clock, the spelling for a flat circular thing is disk. If the occasional disc slips by because you're fixing a libel, don't worry. The world isn't going to end.

AP's disc/disk distinction is the stupidest sort of secret clan handshake imaginable. It doesn't help writers be better writers or readers be smarter readers. It's only there to separate the elect -- essentially, those who claim to find meaning in sheep livers or the flight of birds -- from those who have real work to do. That would be all right if the elect were content to bumble their way off stage between acts, but they aren't. Here, they apparently spooked a good editor into an epic-level mistake, and that's sad.

The War on Editing is serious business. We're not in a position to turn away lots of allies, but if the AP is going to demand adherence to facetious rules as the price of its joining in, then we will continue without the AP until such times as it comes to its senses.

* Here's the correction:
Because of a typographical error, an item in Wednesday's Sports section incorrectly described an injury to NBA player Baron Davis, a guard for the NewYork Knicks. Davis has been troubled by a herniated disk in his back.
** I have a story or so from that side of the fence too.
*** Sorry, I no longer have FMB on 8-track. Got rid of all the 8-tracks when we bought the first house.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/01/06/2902120/corrections-and-clarifications.html#storylink=cpy

You know the drill

2012-01-04T21:48:00.000-05:00

Imagine what it would be like if we had people who read over the day's top story (OK, and all the little stories too) and made sure the words were speled good. We could call them ... "copy editors"!

Akquire culture and keep the brane clean

2012-01-03T21:47:00.001-05:00

We note with regret the departure of cartoonist and illustrator Ronald Searle, and if another term hav begun at yuour skool, you do too.

It's never too late

2012-01-03T11:02:00.001-05:00

If you need an arbitrary point on the calendar at which to forswear evil and embrace good, too bad about the whole New Year thing. But there's still plenty of time to make an Old Christmas resolution -- for example, "I shall wash the Forbidden Verbs right out of my hair and send them on their way":

The Spartans celebrate a 33-30 victory over the University of Georgia at the Outback Bowl on Monday in Tampa. (1A)

Sacramento’s DeMarcus Cousins celebrates after scoring against the Los Angeles Lakers last week. He has since demanded a trade from the Kings. (2B)

Senior quarterback Kirk Cousins celebrates a fourth-quarter touchdown that gives Michigan State its first lead. He would lead another TD drive in the final minutes to force overtime. (1C)

MSU sophomore cornerback Darqueze Dennard celebrates one of his two third-quarter interceptions, this one for a 38-yard touchdown.(4C)

William Gholston celebrates after his fumble recovery in the second quarter. He also led MSU with seven solo tackles. (4C)

The Cowboys’ Markelle Martin celebrates after he recovered a fumble in the third quarter. (6C)

Writing is supposed to be at least a little bit difficult. Banning the Verb of Satan isn't much of a challenge, but it's a start.

Polling sins: Heads are surging!

2012-01-02T10:59:00.001-05:00

I think this is another of those gems for which we can thank Darrell Huff, author of "How to Lie With Statistics": The story about the guy who didn't believe a story he read in the paper, so he went out and bought a dozen more copies to make sure. That's the only way I can explain this bizarre interpretation of an otherwise nondescript poll result, which seems to have cropped up across the nation:

Here's a WashPost blog:
Rick Santorum (4-1): A Des Moines Register poll released Saturday night made plain that the former senator from Pennsylvania is the momentum candidate. Although he took 15 percent overall in the four-day survey, he was at 21 percent in the final two days — a sign that he is peaking in the waning moments.

And the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:
Santorum, who just two weeks ago was polling in single digits, came up third in the Des Moines Register poll. For the final two days of polling, he placed second behind Romney.

The National Review's blog:
In the closely followed Des Moines Register poll just released at 8pm, Romney is 24, Paul 22, Santorum 15, Newt Gingrich 12, Rick Perry 11, and Michele Bachmann 7. That’s the four-day result. If just the last two days are taken into account, Romney is still at 24, Santorum jumps to 21, and Paul is down to 18. That means–in the word of the hour–Santorum has momentum.

The Des Moines Register, condensed in the local fishwrap:
The poll, conducted Tuesday through Friday, shows support for Romney, a Michigan native, at 24%; Paul at 22%, and at 15% for the surging Santorum of Pennsylvania.

But the four-day results don't reflect just how quickly momentum is shifting in a race that has remained highly fluid for months. If the final two days of polling are considered separately, Santorum rises to second place, with 21%, pushing Paul to third, at 18%. Romney remains the same, at 24%.

"Momentum's name is Rick Santorum," said the Register's pollster, J. Ann Selzer.

And Nate Silver's blog at the Times:
However, as The Des Moines Register’s Jennifer Jacobs noted, there is a “twist” in the survey. Over the final two days of polling on Thursday and Friday, Mr. Santorum got 21 percent of the vote, much better than he polled on Tuesday or Wednesday. Mr. Paul, meanwhile, dropped to 18 percent in the final two days of the survey, while Mr. Romney’s standing remained intact at 24 percent.

Because voter preferences in a primary or caucus can be fickle and can change on a near-daily basis, there is a premium in accounting for the most recent information.

Once again, this isn't a partisan development. It pretty much spans the spectrum of mainstream US journalism, from the elite center and center-right "national" papers to Mr. Murdoch's Republican house organ. But it does reflect ideology: here, the journalistic belief that non-evidence-based results are meaningful, as long as enough people say them in the same way. Hence, the obsession with talking about who has "momentum," or who's "surging," without regard to whether "momentum" has been measured or whether the results differ from the previous measurement at better than chance levels.

Here's the problem. More recent information is often at a premium (though it's an ongoing fallacy of journalism to assume that new information is better because it's newer), but the second half of a random sample is not "most recent information." You can illustrate this for yourself by tossing coins.

If heads and tails are the exclusive and exhaustive outcomes of a coin toss,* the safest bet on a series of coin tosses is going to be an even split. That's a better bet the more times you toss the coin, but that doesn't mean later tosses are more accurate than earlier tosses, or that any subset drawn from the second half of your pre-agreed set of tosses indicates an underlying change in how headses and tailses are distributed. You could quite easily get 2 heads and 8 tails in your first 10, then 8 heads and 2 tails on your next,** without either set having any impact on the next toss, let alone the next 80 if you're aiming for 100.

Voter preferences aren't tosses of a coin. They do change, and those changes can be reflected in fairly small samples, and preferences can become more distinct closer to the election. But part of the job in journalism is taking into account the other plausible explanations for what you see. It's not impossible that the Iowa poll detected a significant change in Santorum's support from the first two days to the last two days (which also partly depends on how strict you are about confidence levels). It's equally possible that the two halves of the sample showed the same thing that our 2-8 and 8-2 sets of coin tosses showed: 50-50 is the outcome you'd expect, and the second result doesn't mean heads are "surging."

What you shouldn't do (editors, this means "what you shouldn't let reporters do") is decide which of those choices you report based on what everybody else is doing. A story doesn't become more true when you buy more copies of the paper, or see it repeated more times on CNN, or hear it chewed over on more talk shows. An outcome doesn't become more likely because more people are saying it, or because a particular poll has a good reputation. A good report on the results given above would have either ignored the Santorum split entirely or made clear that it could easily be an accident of sampling.

Here's the HEADSUP-L polling motto, to be recited as often as needed over the next 10 months:
1) What makes polls sexy usually isn't valuable, and what makes them valuable usually isn't sexy
2) Your poll is not an exception

Lather, rinse, repeat.

* We're going to assume the coin is fair and balanced, not Fair 'n' Balanced.
** Funny, that's exactly what we just got. You can test for significant differences in a series of 10-toss sets with the chi-square engine here.

No, no and no, but thanks for asking

2011-12-30T20:39:00.000-05:00

While we're on the subject of New Year's resolutions?

There may have been stories of greater societal significance in 2011 — the tsunami in Japan, the Arab Spring protests and the elimination of Osama bin Laden come to mind — but nothing captivated this town, this nation and much of the world in the same way the Casey Anthony trial did this summer.

a) Don't talk about what captivated "the nation" and "the world" unless you know
b) You don't

Her story had a narrative we could relate to: a middle-class family, an attractive young mother, a precious child named Caylee Marie.

c) And don't talk about what "we" can relate to unless you have a signed statement from your tapeworm.

Don't bogart that calculator

2011-12-30T12:27:00.001-05:00

Copyeds, still searching for a last-minute New Year's resolution? You've come to the right place. Here are two:

1) Never put the alleged "street value" of naughty drugs in the hed
2) Never pass a story containing an estimated "street value" without making sure that the cops are placed on record for the rates they use in calculating "street value." (If there's a fivefold change, of course, you'll want to see that the cops also get to explain that.)

Here's why:

Police say officers confiscated more than 100 pounds of marijuana from two houses. ... Authorities say they found the marijuana -- which they say has a street value of more than $1 million -- along with heat lamps and other equipment used to grow pot.

Let's round down to an even $1 million and 100 pounds (contents may have settled during shipment, or whatever). A million divided by a hundred is $10,000 per pound, or $625 per ounce. In the "His Girl Friday" days, reporters would have had shady underworld acquaintances who could provide current market quotes on short notice, but failing that, we could look into the archives, where we'd find guesses of $1,100 to $2,000 a pound, depending on which agency did the speculating and where.

Breathless reporting of "street value" predates the War on Editing, true, but it's another chunk of evidence that journalism needs more layers of processing, not fewer.

More stupid stuff not to do with polls

2011-12-30T00:17:00.000-05:00

Here's another good example of garden-path journalism -- writers being led up the garden path by something they'd desperately like to be true, even if all the available evidence suggests that there is no there there:

This could be huge for Santorum. I’m guessing people in Iowa like what he says, but needed permission to support him in the form of some assurance that their votes wouldn’t be wasted. If he’s trending upwards in the polls, they get that permission.

OK, it's the National Review shilling for a hard-right candidate, but this isn't a fault of partisanship. NR is doing what journalism does: hammering the data into a story line it wants to see, rather than asking the data what the story should look like. That's not a partisan issue, but it is an ideological one. We won't fix it by demanding that National Review* stop inflating the appeal of repellent sleazeballs; we can begin to address it if we ask our news organizations to stick with the numbers and treat the campaign "story line" as the cultural fiction that it is.

To assess all that, let's have a look at how and under what conditions some (otherwise rational) news organization might want to claim that "Santorum jumps to third." On to some recent polling results, for which we'll draw on the data kept at RealClearPolitics.

Once again, never -- that's "never," as in never -- allow the "RCP average" to be quoted in a news article or grownup opinion piece. It is a meaningless number, as is every "average" of polls involving different populations and different sample sizes. But the crosstab does provide some useful information that helps illustrate how random sampling works and what it does and doesn't illuminate. For that, RCP is genuinely useful:

To put this into context, it helps to remember what samples do, and the most important thing that random samples do is form a normal distribution around the population mean. If 42.5% of registered voters believe that pigs can fly and you regularly ask 400 randomly chosen registered voters whether pigs can fly, you'll usually get a "yes" result that's fairly close to 42.5%. Indeed, about two-thirds of the time, you'll get a result between 40% and 45%. If you roughly double that confidence level, the "margin of error" will be 4.9 percentage points -- meaning that 95 percent of the time, somewhere between 37.6% and 47,4% of your 400 registered voters will agree that pigs can fly.

Based on the samples shown in the second illustration, then, we could plausibly say that Santorum has "jumped to third." Or that he's "plummeted to fifth." Or that he's "hanging right around a tie for fourth." (Or, of course, that Romney has leapt into the lead, which is statistically as valid as Santorum's jump into third and should be at least as interesting, if you take this sort of crap seriously.) All those are ways of describing the results we see, and the more exciting they sound, the more likely they are to be wrong.

Take it to the bank, kids. If five roughly simultaneous small-N polls of the same population show that a candidate's support is at 10, 16, 10, 3, and 1o, the smart money is on 10, with a side bet on stupid, confused, and nonrepresentative.** The National Review is grasping at straws here, but it's grasping at the same sorts of straws that our supposedly professional journalists grasp at too.

Need some free advice? Here's how to calculate the "margin of error": First, start with a random sample. Divide 0.25*** by the number of cases in the sample (with a sample of 400, you should get something like 0.000625). Take the square root of that, then multiply by 1.96 to get the margin of sampling error at 95% confidence.

It's no harder than calculating an earned-run average, except that back in the good old days of baseball we didn't have calculators. Well, we do now. Editors who deal with political surveys should own the "margin of error" as thoroughly as the sports desk owns ERAs and slugging percentages, and the calculations are about three clicks away on your "start" button.

One logical consequence of that basic approach to statistical competence is that we should begin every discussion about who's leading or diving or treading water in any campaign with a few simple question: Sez who? On what evidence? Who cares? Whichever your perspective, that's how you should go after the next story about who's planted his or her flag in the smoking ruins of what enemy capital, and on what statistical grounds. You might find the results surprising.

* I'd like to think Bill Buckley would be repelled by NR's enthusiastic embrace of overt, knuckle-dragging racism, but that's a distinctly non-empirical opinion.
** Sorry if that sounds like the modern American electorate or the modern Amercan newsroom.
*** There's a reason for this; a 50-50 split produces the largest possible confidence interval, so this is the "maximum margin of sampling error."

One born every minute (a slight return)

2011-12-27T23:14:00.001-05:00

Two distinct levels of clueless- ness are in play here.

In the first, we take the lede and its supporting evidence:

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called "underwear bomber," shares traits with other terrorists including a keen focus and sense of purpose, says a local handwriting expert, who compared his handwriting to some of the United States' more notorious criminals.

... Those same characteristics are evident in the writings of convicted terrorists Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, said Holmes, owner of Pentec Inc.

Those traits in the bombers' handwriting aren't unique to terrorists, she added.

The hed represents a basic editing fault. The lede says "shares traits with terrorists," but it only takes a few grafs for the story to admit that "terror traits" are the sort of thing shared by a couple of notorious terrorists and, well, some amount of other people, ranging from a few to almost everybody. If the breathless nonsense in the lede is directly contradicted a few grafs later, the editor's job is to strangle the lede in its crib -- not to amplify the nonsense in display type.

And that takes us to the more important fault: Why is this story in the paper in the first place? (You may draw your own conclusions from its presence on the front.) Let's look back to the source's credentials:

The confessed terrorist's manifesto was written in a tight, spidery scrawl that reveals a "frightening intelligence," said Ruth Holmes, a Bloomfield Hills-based handwriting expert whose testimony in court cases has been used to verify the authenticity of written documents.

The methodological warrant for which would be ....?

Holmes also was quick to note that testimony about an individual's physical or mental condition based on handwriting is not allowed in court.

You mean made-up nonsense about supposed psychological states is ... actually treated differently from actual evidence about how people form letters and words?

Word spacing, letter slant, slope and pen strokes are caused by neurological impulses that start in the brain and are carried by nerves to the hand, she said. So emotions and personality are revealed.

Really? Would there be some evidence for this supposed relationship -- some way in which we could reliably demonstrate a link between "word spacing" and "letter slant" on the one hand and "emotions and personality" on the other? There's our real problem. A good slot editor would have kicked the hed back on grounds of simple cluelessness, but any of three editors -- at the line or the rim or the slot -- could have pointed out that the story is nonsensical on its face. The whole "terror traits" thing is a fairy tale. It's made up. It wants to sell you a bridge.

Your job, as an editor, is to ask simple questions. Why is this interesting? What would it take for this to be true? Are any of those conditions met? Won't people think we're stupid and naive if we don't ask questions like that before we publish stories, rather than after?

Snakes, spiders on ceiling

2011-12-23T10:30:00.000-05:00

For those who still think the Dacron Republican-Democrat was a work of fiction:

Sign missing; skateboarders seen in area
A sign was stolen from the area of Walnut and University recently. The sign, valued at $300, was taken around 4 p.m. Saturday. Several skateboarders were seen in the area shortly before the theft.

Thank you, America's Newspapers.

Why do you think it's on the test?

2011-12-22T08:52:00.008-05:00

Given this from the Nation's Newspaper of Record:

Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about the concern of some economists that a failure to extend the payroll tax cut could undercut the country’s fragile economic recovery described incorrectly the increase in taxes that would occur without such Congressional action. Taxes on the payroll income of America’s 160 million wage earners would increase to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent; the change would not amount to a 2 percent tax increase.

And this, from the Foremost Newspaper of the Carolinas:

Employees have paid a 4.2 percent Social Security tax this year, a 2 percent cut.

... three questions (rounded for your convenience):

What's the percentage increase when a tax rises from 4 percent to 6 percent?
What's the percentage decrease when a tax falls from 6 to 4 percent*?
If a tax rate is cut by 50 percent one year and that result is raised by 50 percent the following year, is the resulting tax rate the same as the initial tax rate?

These will continue to be on the final until there's evidence from the field that America's Newspapers -- whether international, regional or hyperlocal, whether delivered in print or through some yet-unimagined satanic tablet device developed in some garage in California -- can get the answers right at better than chance levels.

* Your audience is significantly -- χ² (2 df) 53.25, p = .001, v = 0.648 -- less bothered by "30 to 40 percent" than by "$2 to $3 million," if you're looking for style rules to reconsider.

No, but thanks for asking

2011-12-14T14:49:00.000-05:00

If the worldwide OMG MUSLIMS!!!! conspiracy is quiescent for the day and both sides in the War on Xpesmasse are refitting, you can always fall back on the godless Communists. Unfortunately, answers to the Stupid Question in the creatively boldfaced hed range from "not really" to -- is it Anne Beatts we're paraphrasing here? -- "looks like a carrier, Bluto, only smaller."

The trouble with secret weapons is that they're supposed to be secret, and there seems to be hardly anything secret about this one -- not this voyage, not the first, not the appearance of the fearsome behemoth itself, not anything. It may yet be a mystery what the heathens in Beijing have in mind for it, but it's pretty clear what it's doing at Fox: Sign your kids up for those Mandarin lessons now, moms and dads, because this is what's ahead if the feckless Kenyan socialist wins another term!

One born every minute

2011-12-13T23:38:00.000-05:00

No. No, it wouldn't. For one thing, I just looked, and it didn't.For another, nonce words come and go all the time without landing in "the dictionary." And for another, do you really want a dictionary that defines one bit of jargon with another?

No, what's happened is that another reporter has decided that a press release from Global Language Monitor, a self-promoting language-hackery website that specializes in made-up lexical milestones and ideological fictions, is worth a story. And, of course, that a string of editors promoted the result to a 1A centerpiece. And once again, arrant nonsense is loosed upon the world:

Remember, this isn’t a fan blogging about the greatness of Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. USA Today compares the Global Language Monitor to an online equivalent to Webster’s Dictionary.

And if USA Today told you that some random website was as good at diagnosing that troublesome pain as your kindly old family doctor, you'd believe it -- why?

Our intrepid reporter manages to find someone who has a clue:

“The dictionary’s job is to record usage,” University of Colorado at Colorado Springs professor of English Tom Napierkowski said Monday. “An editor of a dictionary is not some supreme language authority. The editor of a dictionary doesn’t have a privilege or right to create new words. The editor’s job is to tell the rest of us how, and under what circumstances, a word is being used.”

... but seems not to have paid attention to what the local expert was probably implying, which -- I'd like to think -- was along the lines of "why would you think this is a story?" Because surely there's something better to do with your dwindling stash of newsprint than to demonstrate to your audience that you'll buy more or less any handful of magic beans that comes down the turnpike.

Elongated yellow safety restraint

2011-12-11T22:10:00.000-05:00

The people in the first motor vehicle?

Neither of them were wearing their seatbelts, according to the highway patrol report.

And in the second?

Rippee was using her safety restraint, while Kitchens was not, according to the highway patrol.

Unless "seatbelt" goes behind a paywall after the first 15 uses a month, it's hard to see why "safety restraint" made its appearance here.

If house style calls for making the Kansas Highway Patrol into "the highway patrol" on second reference, by the way, house style should be reconsidered. Shortened versions of proper names are still proper names; if you're John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith in the eyes of the DMV and the draft board, you're still Jake Smith, not jake smith, in the news columns. The Kansas Highway Patrol, the Highway Patrol, the agency. Clear?

And thanks to the Elongated Yellow Fruit Bureau for the tip.

Of inventors and clues

2011-12-10T21:07:00.000-05:00

All those nice rules that make heds tighter and shorter -- drop the auxiliaries, drop the articles, drop the linking verbs, and the like -- can also turn a once-simple phrase into a crash blossom on short notice. Such is the issue here as our friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network do their best to perform damage control on Newt Gingrich's foray into the Balfour-era politics of the Near East. Gingrich dresses up a familiar set of talking points:

"Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community," Gingrich said.

... and in the breathless syntax of the homepage, we get "Candidate draws fire for saying Palestinians 'invented' people." I mean, you could see them inventing the Internet or the compact disc or algebra, but the whole human race?

It's always nice to be reminded that some of Fox's cluelessness is down to simple incompetence, rather than the sort of deliberate ideology that rises to the top at news organizations through the hiring and promotion process.* But it's still a disheartening comment on the state of American journalism -- party politics aside -- to note the ease with which genuinely loony assertions reach the public with little to nothing in the way of contextual checking-and-balancing from the press.

The amusing walkback from the Gingrich camp ("To understand what is being proposed and negotiated you have to understand decades of complex history -- which is exactly what Gingrich was referencing") suggests the scale of the problem. Historical ignorance is the petri dish of dishonest campaigning. The non-issue that arose in May -- Obama's alleged demand that Israel return to the 1967 borders as a precondition for talks -- would have been laughed out of the park by a press corps that had paid attention to even the last two decades of fairly simple history. Candidates who asserted that claim as a matter of fact would have been asked why, in effect, they should be nominated based on a belief that water flows uphill.

Gingrich, of course, is supposed to be different from the Bachmanns and the Perrys and the Cains because he's a perfesser. When he lectures, he's supposed to be talking from the brain, in addition to whatever strange vestigial organ the rest are declaiming from. This distinction may or may not provide its own hilarity as primary season begins.

* Grownup news tries to be nonpartisan, but that doesn't mean it isn't deeply ideological.

Polling sins: Lying is so rarely a good idea

2011-12-09T23:59:00.001-05:00

Today's quiz: Is the president's approval rating higher or lower than it was last month? What do you say there, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

... Forty-four percent of voters approve and 51 percent disapprove of President Obama’s job performance, according to a Fox News poll released Friday.

Last month, 42 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved.

Judging from the headline, then, his approval rating fell from 42 percent to 44 percent. Aren't you just on the edge of your seat waiting for the next Fox report on gasoline prices?

We can, and should, raise a lot of questions about what this 2-point change means, if it means anything at all. How does this poll compare with others like it this week? Is any change from last month's version of the same poll conclusive, or is there too much wash in there to judge?

Before we do those, though, let's take a moment to point out what's right about Fox polling. Whatever your friends or your stylebook might say, it really doesn't matter whether a poll is funded by the forces of light or the forces of darkness. Methods are what counts: What questions did you ask? How did you draw the sample? How did you proceed in the field?

On those standards, the number we're looking at -- the proportion answering "approve" or "disapprove" on the presidential job performance question -- is pretty solid. Fox changed pollsters in February; its new agency stays in the field a little longer and gets a (very) slightly bigger sample than the previous one, but on a straightforward question like approval, there's no reason to doubt the result.

What sort of change the result represents is a different matter. Fox reports the margin of sampling error as 3 percentage points for the whole sample, which is wrong (it's a little over 3.2), but it gets credit for giving the confidence intervals for subgroups too. The change from last month is nonsignificant at traditional confidence levels. Obama's approval rating might well have risen a little, but that change also might well reflect the normal sort of churn that occurs when you estimate from a sample to a population.

An increase of 42% to 44% in the sample value could also reflect an actual decline in the population value. Approval of Obama's job performance among all registered voters could have fallen from 42% to 41%, and a sample value of 44% would still be within one tick* of the real thing.

It's easy to visualize this if you draw a horizontal line for the percentages, with vertical lines at each month's value.* From each vertical line, draw another horizontal line to represent the "margin of error" -- for Obama's December result, you'd start with 44 and draw a line from 40.8 (44-3.2) to 47.2 (44+3.2). Then pretend each vertical line is the center of a little Christmas bell!*** The more your bells overlap, the more cautious you want to be in saying that 44 is conclusively bigger than 42. (Refer back to the principles of survey reporting: Polls are rarely as interesting as you think they are.)

That abundance of caution should explain why we're wary about saying that a 2-point increase is a real increase, but it should also indicate why a 2-point increase is much less likely to be a "drop." Overenthusiasm in the first case makes one a statistical klutz; overenthusiasm in the second case is strongly correlated with lying.

And that has to be a problem if you're contracted to find data for our friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. You can do a perfectly creditable job at all the things that make polling valid and reliable; on the evidence, that's what the professionals who run the Fox News Poll do. But when the information leaves your hands, it passes to people who tell lies as a matter of professional duty, career advancement, and sheer revulsion at the thought of having a Kenyan Muslim Communist defiling the White House. Must be a challenge explaining all that on the old CV.

* Standard error of proportion. Multiply it by 1.96 to get the "margin of error" at 95% confidence.
** For comparing two candidates in the same poll, draw a vertical line for each candidate. Same idea.
*** Ding dong merrily on high, and don't forget to report those effect sizes!

Jackanapes pwned, booyah!

2011-12-07T08:54:00.000-05:00

Under the heading "we must keep our instruments in tune," Jack Kilpatrick recalled a note he got in his early editorial days from the historian and editor D.S. Freeman: Mr. Kilpatrick: If you start purple, finish purple. In other words, don't start downmarket and expect your audience to follow seamlessly when you go high-end broadsheet.

We're used to the armchair belligerence favored by Fox Nation hed writers whenever the home team is smacking around, or schooling, or obliterating, or deveining some pesky liberal, but seriously -- "chap"? What's next: Rush Makes Example of This Hepcat?

If you don't know by now ...

2011-12-06T23:59:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's true. Nobody at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network actually knows the answer, so they're just kinda crowdsourcing it. Be sure to help them out if they call!

A Christmas display outside the courthouse in Leesburg, VA featuring Santa Claus crucified on a cross was torn down by an angry resident in spite of arguments by elected leaders that the display was Constitutionally-protected free speech.

Anyway. Believe it or not, the War on Christmas itself doesn't actually appear to be a separate beat at Fox. It's part of a larger beat, the shape of which you can discern in this set of recent representative stories from the same writer who produced today's frontpage piece:

School Bans Song Lyrics with Jesus, Santa or Christmas
A New Jersey high school admits that it “inadvertently” censored Christmas songs that include the words God, Jesus, Santa, Christmas and Chanukah – in place of music that would not be “belief-specific.” (Dec. 6)

U.S. Military to Rescind Policy Banning Bibles at Hospital
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said they are rescinding a policy that prohibits family members of wounded military troops from bringing Bibles or any religious reading materials to their loved ones. (Dec. 2)

Fort Worth Bans Santa From Classrooms
Students and parents in Forth Worth, TX are outraged after the school district declared that Christmas celebrations – including Santa Claus would no longer be allowed during the school day. (Dec. 2)

Iraq Veteran Wins Battle With Virginia County to Keep Kids' Tree House
A zoning board in Farifax County, Va., has granted a reprieve to a war veteran, allowing him to keep the tree house he built for his two sons in their yard. (Nov. 30)

Cancer Center Reverses Santa Ban, Still Nixes Religious Christmas Decorations
A South Carolina cancer center that gave Santa Claus the boot has reversed its decision, but said they will ban any Christmas decorations that are religious in nature – including the Nativity. (Nov. 16)

Obama Administration Opposes FDR Prayer at WWII Memorial
Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are expressing outrage after the Obama administration announced its objection to adding President Franklin Roosevelt's D-Day prayer to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Nov. 4)

Atheist Group Tries to Stop Prayers at High School Football Games That Include ‘Jesus’
An Alabama school district has been accused of allowing prayers that invoke the name of Jesus during high school football games, according to a complaint filed by a national atheist organization. (Oct. 26)

Christian Club Sues School Over Media Restriction
An Oklahoma school district is facing a lawsuit for allegedly forbidding organizers of a Christian club from promoting events on campus. (Oct. 24)

Yes, Virginia, there is a sanity clause. Every contract has one.

Polling sins: Don't do this either

2011-12-04T22:24:00.000-05:00

Second in an occasional series

OK, Santa isn't exactly a polling issue. He's there to remind you that Fox® brand news is always going to be a little different from grownup news. "Gingrich surges to the lead in Iowa GOP poll," on the other hand, is worth noting because NPR made the same bizarre misrepresentation of some pretty straightforward data this morning. (I heard it around 8:20, shortly after opening the Fox homepage.)

The offense here isn't using notionally "objective" data to cloak a partisan agenda, though that happens. It's pretending that a poll supports a storyline it doesn't support, and that occurs across the news spectrum. It's part of the broader journalistic instinct to make things sound more exciting, or authoritative, or novel, than they are. The editor's job is to remind writers that there is no Santa Claus. Polls say only what they say, and that's rarely as interesting as you think it is. Let's proceed.

Here's the AP lede Fox used:

Newt Gingrich has taken the lead in a poll of Republican voters in Iowa, followed by Ron Paul and Mitt Romney.

And, under the hed "Gingrich surges in new Iowa presidential poll," a Reuters lede from Northern Illinois public radio:

A surge in support for Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich has made him the new front-runner in Iowa, which holds the first of next year's presidential nominating contests, according to a closely watched opinion poll published on Saturday.

The poll in question is the Des Moines Register's, and it covered 401 Iowans described as "likely Republican caucusgoers," surveyed Nov. 27-30. It shows Gingrich at 25%, followed by Ron Paul at 18% and Mitt Romney at 16%. All those things are true and worth reporting. Our concern is with the extra baggage -- whether this is a "surge," whether Gingrich has "taken the lead" or "stepped into the breach," whether Romney had an "armor-plated" average to dent, and so forth. For that, we need to look at this poll in context of other polls.

The Real Clear Politics poll collection is a good place to start. Fair warning: Never, ever use the "Real Clear Politics average." It's a meaningless number; you can't take a simple average of surveys with different sample sizes, and you can't take a plausible average at all of samples from different populations ("all adults" vs. "likely voters," for example). It doesn't matter what the Washington Post and the New York Times think. Do not use this number. Feel free, though, to ask what a succession of polls suggests about the broad outlines of public opinion. (Drawing conclusions from snapshots isn't the same thing as pretending random snapshots form a movie.) Let's look at a few plausible ways to do that.

It helps to keep in mind a couple of things about "poll says" and what it represents.We're interested in two figures: the population value and the sample value. For any group we're interested in -- say, "likely Republican voters" -- there's a number that represents exactly what every member of that group would say if we polled them today.* Because finding that population value would cost far more time and money than it's worth, we're going to take a random sample and estimate from the sample value to the population.

The most important thing about sampling is that, when it's done correctly, samples form a normal distribution -- a bell curve, if you want -- around the population value. If you take 20 random samples, half of them will probably be above the population value and half below. The more people you talk to in any sample, the closer that sample value is likely to be to the population value. That's the biggest factor in determining the "margin of sampling error," about which more in a moment.

In polling of likely Iowa voters since mid-November, we can note that Gingrich's support is consecutively 32%, 28%, 26% and 25%. Does that mean his support is surging, declining, or forming a normal curve around some yet-undetermined point? We don't know, but some guesses are better than others. He's more likely to be going down than going up; if the Register's poll had sampled as many people as the Rasmussen poll of Nov. 15, we wouldn't be off base to say the decline was statistically significant at 95% confidence. But it's also possible that his support has settled in the upper 20s and this series of polls is doing exactly what a normal distribution would do.

We can be pretty confident, though, in saying this poll doesn't find a "surge" that has propelled Gingrich to the top; he hasn't "taken the lead" in this poll, and he isn't the "new front-runner." A more sober lede might point out that whatever strange implosions have occurred aboard the Cain Train in the past two weeks, Gingrich's support is somewhere between unchanged and slightly lower.

And the other candidates? If Romney actually had an armor-plated average, it was probably dented in mid-to late October. Since then, he's been pretty much where you'd expect a candidate in the upper teens to be. Ron Paul? For a candidate who's been somewhere between 10% and 20% since summer, his support is either (a) fluctuating wildly day by day or (b) somewhere in the middle teens -- exactly what a bunch of frequent small-N polls seem to be showing.

Lessons? Iowa is neither America nor New Hampshire (where Republicans seem to be paying consistently more attention to Jon Huntsman, notwithstanding the brief Cain surge; on RCP's crosstab, it's kind of fun to watch the infatuation with the loonies move from right to left). But more broadly, public opinion rarely changes fast enough to be as interesting as political writers want it to be. That's a problem, because competent polling is expensive, and no one can expect to please the bean-counters with a lede that says "Things aren't especially interesting and haven't changed very much."

Still, that's the job. When the upper management comes along to ask why the headline doesn't say "SURGES INTO LEAD" or "CLAWS BACK INTO FIGHT," our task is to say "Because that's not what the data say."

* If at this point you're noting that we're still 11 months from the election, you may now have a beer on the house. Any proclamations about what will happen next spring, summer or fall should be treated as the guesses they are.

Stop eating children

2011-11-30T23:35:00.000-05:00

That pesky comma of direct address! You can't fool it by putting the thing you're addressing at the beginning of the hed. It will have its revenge.

The command after the semicolon helps a bit, but I don't think it's conclusive. This is a letter to the editor, so the Donner Party meaning could be a plausible reflection of the get-off-my-lawn randomness of day's letters.

Whether the intended meaning is accurate is another question altogether. Its intent appears to be drawn from the last sentence:

It's time people start being responsible for their own futures, and not rely on the government for handouts.

But the letter as printed makes no mention of Occupiers or Occupying. The Observer is known to whack the letters pretty hard, so it's certainly possible that the cutting-room floor is littered with 700-some carefully crafted words damning the Occupiers for the stalinist lizard creatures they are. Or the hed writer might have simply made it up. And fundamental cluelessness about the Donner Party comma hardly fills one with confidence.

Put a quark in it

2011-11-27T08:36:00.000-05:00

Surely you jest, Nation's Newspaper of Record:

The Vows column last Sunday, about the marriage of Sunny Jacobs and Peter Pringle, misspelled the name of the city in Ireland where Ms. Jacobs had a speaking engagement. It is Cork, not Quark.

Journalistic fraud made easy

2011-11-24T13:09:00.000-05:00

Surprised it took nearly a day for the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to come up with a story from the latest batch of leaked "Climategate" e-mails? Well, it appears to have been worth the wait:

Did $16 Stand in the Way
of Climate Science?
The head of a key British climate lab, a central figure in the 2009 "Climategate" scandal, thought requests made under Great Britain's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) were a nuisance that should be stonewalled while crucial correspondence is deleted -- unless someone pays up first, that is.

My, my, my. In order, I guess:
1) There's no indication $16 stood in the way of anything
2) Don't feel bad if you don't recall the key players of "Climategate." It was only a scandal in a small part of the world
3) We don't know what anybody thinks about FOI requests in general. That's just made-up

But on Planet Fox, Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit is a household name, so let's see what drives this tale to the top of the front page:

... According to the December 2008 email exchange, Jones wrote to David Palmer, the information policy and compliance manager for East Anglia's research unit at the time, arguing that unless a fee accompanied a FOIA request for information, he didn't need to bother going to the trouble of replying.

"Dave, do I understand it correctly -- if he doesn't pay the £10 we don't have to respond?" Jones asked. The sum he requested, £10, is worth about $16 U.S. dollars.

"No, we don't have to respond unless we get the £10," Palmer told Jones -- before reading him the riot act over deleting emails, a direct violation of Britain's Data Protection Act of 1998, he said.

Ten pounds would have been a little less than $15 as of Dec. 1, 2008, but that's not the point. When you present stuff ordered in the manner of news, you're warranting that it's not just new but relevant. Underneath that idea is an assumption that if a question bears on your topic, you've asked it; if you say the sky is falling, you've determined that a reasonable journalist could settle the matter by looking out the window, and you've looked out the window. Here, we might reasonably ask how odd it would be for a UK agency to charge a fee for costs incurred in meeting an FOI request. As it takes almost no time to find out, not very:

Your estimate can only include the costs of:

determining whether your authority holds the information;
locating the information, or a document which may contain it;
retrieving the information, or a document which may contain it; and
extracting the information from a document containing it.

For the purposes of the estimate, you should cost the time taken on these activities at £25 per person per hour regardless of actual cost.

I like information, and I think public information ought to be public, and I'll be among the first to note that freedom of information -- like freedom of speech -- is a right guaranteed to complete sleazebags as surely as it is guaranteed to the pure of motive. But j-schools teach the tactics as well as the letter of FOI laws for a reason. Legal interactions begin as human interactions, and if you're the sort of person who's rude and overbearing toward clerks, recordkeepers, and desk officers, don't be surprised when your requests are met at the slow end of the pace required by law. When you're trying to destroy someone's career, you shouldn't expect that person to give you a discount.

There's no reason to believe anyone "only responded to requests for information if paid," as the frontpage blurb says, or that anyone thinks all FOI requests are nuisance. It seems fair to guess that, when requests come in from the sort of bottom-feeders who have enabled the pseudocontroversy known as "Climategate," they get less than top-priority treatment. That's the window the intrepid journalists at Fox resolutely refuse to look out of when the party's interests are at stake.

To reiterate: No. I don't want the people who hold information to be in charge of judging the motives of people who want information. That's up to the marketplace of ideas. Do your part today to ridicule Fox News and all its allies and friends!

Your winnings, sir

2011-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Stop press! The WashPost ombud is going to get to the bottom of those shocking allegations that George Will might be hiding a secret political bias or three amid the hard-hitting analytical impartiality of his column!

The Post’s prickly, Pulitzer Prize-winning, conservative columnist George F. Will is one-half of a Washington political power couple. His wife, Mari Maseng Will, is a longtime Republican operative who was President Reagan’s final communications director and performed the same role for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.

The couple, over the years, has been splashed by the sometimes stinging but purifying hot waters of transparency and disclosure, especially as those waters flow by their two careers and their closeness to senior Republicans.

Those purifying hot waters of transparency! Anyway:

... So it was not surprising that Politico revealed in three stories Nov. 11 that Maseng Will worked for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) early this year, flirted with Mitt Romney’s campaign in June and was hired full time by Texas Gov. Rick Perry early this month.

Should Will have disclosed it, and did he give favorable treatment to these GOP candidates?

Well, sure. If he wanted to be taken seriously as a reliable commenter on American campaigns and politics, it would probably help to disclose apparent conflicts of interest. (And the 1980 debate season would have been a good time to start, but there you go.) But that's not what George Will does. Why ask him to start now, when everyone is having such a good time?

One hates to bring up too many familiar refrains here, but if the ombud wants to do something useful, he could stop straining at gnats -- how hard Will attacked which Republican on which date, and how that correlates with Will's wife's professional calendar -- and take on a camel or two. George Will makes stuff up. Worse, he makes stuff up and publishes it on your op-ed page, where people who don't know better risk mistaking it for professionally vetted journalism.

I don't think anyone wants a world in which the ombud or the public editor takes opinion writers to task for their opinions. It'd be nice to see one rise up and challenge a columnist on the evidence, though.

What light through yonder winder shines?

2011-11-22T22:18:00.000-05:00

If you're going to indulge in irksome hed cliches -- and you aren't, are you? -- at least try to get them to read correctly. Go ahead. Live dangerously. Spend the space on that first "a"!

Then I don't know Arkansas

2011-11-22T22:14:00.001-05:00

Can it be? The return of Spinoculars, only now with added Science®?

Bull beware: Truth goggles sniff
out suspicious sentences in news

You’re reading a wrap-up of the Sept. 22 Republican presidential debate when you land on this claim from Rep. Michele Bachmann: “President Obama has the lowest public approval ratings of any president in modern times.”

Really? You start googling for evidence. Maybe you scour the blogs or the fact-checking sites. It takes work, all that critical thinking.

That’s why Dan Schultz, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab (and newly named Knight-Mozilla fellow for 2012), is devoting his thesis to automatic bullshit detection. Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles — not actual magical eyewear, alas, but software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. It’s possible because of a novel arrangement: Schultz struck a deal with fact-checker PolitiFact for access to its private APIs.

You can call it "truthiness" all you want, but it's still going to rely on someone else doing the work first -- if some semblance of the phrase is in the magic database to start with, and it's close enough for your algorithm to recognize it, and if you really need a bullshit detector to tell when Michele Bachmann is lying.

I don't think we ought to blame the grad student here, but the people who set out to write about what grad students do might want to consider recalibrating their credulous featurization machinery.

Aaaaaaaaaagh

2011-11-16T23:33:00.000-05:00

What is it about the 1A rail that brings out the secret cliche writer in people?

No. Please. No "big chill." And when the snow comes, it won't be "white stuff."

Poynter needs a clue

2011-11-16T10:05:00.001-05:00

Most of what needs to be said about the great Poynter-Romenesko flap has been said already. I will add that if the hed above is an example of the new! improved! way of doing things, someone needs to go back to the drawing board.

No online newcomer is going to become the "conservative New York Times." We already have a conservative New York Times. It's called the New York Times.

If the Poynter Institute has joined the credulous ranks of those who see the NYT as the home of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy (press division), it's going to fall very quickly -- and deservedly -- from the ranks of must-see-daily sites.

The horror

2011-11-14T23:35:00.000-05:00

The story online is corrected now, but here's the original lede:

The tiny Chevrolet Spark will launch next year as General Motors’ first mass-produced pink car for U.S. markets.

Really? Look, I know Chrysler is the one with the ads that say "This is the Motor City," but ... the Sunday bizness section had nobody within shouting range whose first reaction to that was "then who made pink Cadillacs?"

(While we're at it? Don't begin corrections by saying an article "contained incorrect information." That's why it's a correction. Tell us what you did wrong and get it over with.)

Speak for yourself

2011-11-14T10:49:00.000-05:00

Q: Why do mean-spirited old editors insist on crushing the souls of the vibrant young spirits who write for the modern press?
A: Because they can!

No, not really. It's because no matter how often the message is shared, somebody has always just stepped out for coffee. Christmas is going to be right on time this year, no matter how tempted you are to say otherwise. And no, we do not scream for ice cream.

I don't know if there's a correlation between the frequency of Forbidden Ledes and the rise of editing hubs, but it's worth looking at. Maybe the howls of pain and gales of derisive laughter from within your own newsroom were enough to break youngsters of these habits.

Perhaps one of our technologically advanced friends could come up with an alternative solution? An app that throws a dictionary across the room toward the workstation at which a "there's an app for that" lede has been entered?

Polling sins: Don't do this

2011-11-12T21:33:00.000-05:00

I suppose it's that time of year again. You've had your annual cautions about Christmas, so let's proceed with the routine warnings about the abuse of surveys and survey data. Here are two broad concepts to remember:

Polls only say what they say
Numbers only do what they do

And two larger-scale concepts that bring in some issues of news practice and media routines:

Bad habits that good organizations adopt are still bad habits
Polls are never as interesting as you think they are

First up is the hed shown above, which reflects an offense at the top of the story itself:

Eight GOP presidential candidates will debate national defense issues tonight in South Carolina, where conservatives have been steadfast in supporting national defense and military spending.

... But a new poll, out this week, suggests the candidates might be better off talking more about their proposed cures for the country's domestic troubles.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't "suggest" anything about what candidates would be better or worse off talking about. The poll says the economy is the top issue for 73% of older people (average age 64) in South Carolina. Given the situation of the past three and a half years, it'd be a surprise if the economy wasn't the top issue, and since 73% is what Gallup found nationally on roughly the same question, it's hard to see why anyone thought this was an unusual result.

But "most important issue" isn't the same thing as "only issue," so the real question is: Who cares what the reporter thinks?* The candidates have talked a lot about the economy. This is the debate that's supposed to be about "national defense." For most of the candidates, that's some variation of "turrists ayrabs eye-ran obama SHARIA LAW!!1!!1!!," but it's still a set of issues they ought to be put on the spot about.** Interesting things can result; if I'm recalling it correctly, Gerry Ford's famous semi-flub about Eastern Europe came on questions from an NYT foreign correspondent.

We'll take a look at the rest of our questions and propositions in the next few days, time and deadlines permitting.

* And while we're at it, no. "Woot, woot!" is not appropriate for a Twitter message announcing that you're about to go cover a debate among presidential candidates.
** I have this recurring fantasy of getting to ask a question at one of these debates: "Congresswoman Bachmann, here's the view from David Ben-Gurion's grave at the collective farm where he retired. As president, how would you love Israel while chastising them for having so much socialism and communist health care and stuff?"

Fox hed verb of the morning

2011-11-12T10:03:00.001-05:00

The Fox Nation -- where schooling, smacking down and clock-cleaning are standard hed fare -- takes a seafood-counter turn with this one. One can only imagine what lies ahead:

Hannity Previously Freezes Liberal Politico

Rush Peels And Eats Pig Maher

Coulter Refreshes Occupy Savages

(If there's ever a contest for Right-Wing Radio Host who Sounds Most Like a 1940s Cartoon of Father Coughlin Morphing into Joseph Goebbels, by the way, Mark Levin would be a consensus preseason Top 20 pick.)

A toast for Veterans Day

2011-11-11T23:09:00.001-05:00

While we're celebrating the return of basketball with a Carolina game on an aircraft carrier in San Diego, let's pause for a toast to the folks who will get up tomorrow and go to work aboard the Vinson, and their past and present comrades in arms.

Raising a glass here are members of the "black gang" of LST708, in San Diego en route to the Pacific in December 1944. Language Czarina's dad, Joe, is second from left. They had, as you don't have to imagine, a fairly dangerous year ahead, but it was at least finite. On this day in 1945, Joe was at Guam and waiting for the carrier that would take him back to the States.

Joe had worked at one of the Ford plants and spent a little time training as a cook, but after the war he wasn't interested in working indoors, so he got a job at the city cemetery. He stayed there until he retired as superintendent, and when he died -- 60 years after the photo above was taken, give or take a few days -- that's where he was buried.

I had a chance to wave to Joe for Veterans Day, because I took the kitties in for a checkup. We use the same vet that they used even before Language Czarina came along, and it's -- literally -- across Main Street from his corner of the cemetery. You don't need the flags to know Joe has a lot of company. You can brush away the leaves and see all the wars that people and their families remember.

Many ordinary-seeming people we run across in our ordinary lives have done very extraordinary things. I hope journalists always remember that, but that's a special case of hoping that everyone always remembers that.

Overcorrecting

2011-11-10T22:46:00.001-05:00

"In general," says the AP's "fewer, less" entry, "use fewer for individual items, less for bulk or quantity." That's a good general rule; you can follow it and recommend it with no fear of setting off a which-hunt. And it should be pretty clear pretty fast that, in this case, the general rule calls for "less."

The sentence is a quantity, measured here in years but equally measurable in months -- or, at the county jail, in weeks or days. "Fewer than 34 years" would be, oh, 33 or 32 years; "less than 34 years" is an amount under* 34 years, whether it's measured in years and months, months and days, years and days, or fathoms per hogshead.

It's tempting to say the hed at hand follows the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit, but that's not really true. It ignores the letter of the law as well. Here's the AP:

Wrong: She was fewer than 60 years old. (Years in this sense refers to a period of time, not individual years.)

There's a lot to dislike about the hed. I like it better when newspapers leave the topic-comment stuff to radio or TV, and as the years drag on, I'm less and less impressed by design habits that force all lede stories to be told in words of five or fewer letters.** That's OK for subject-verb-object heds, as long as the subject and object are "Iraq" or "Iran" or "cops" and the verb is "nab" or "seize" or "blast," but it's of limited use otherwise. And I really don't like heds that assume I've already read the story.

But my biggest complaint is with the "fewer," because it's so easy to envision all the time that can be eaten up by a nice old-fashioned less/fewer argument on deadline. Meanwhile, up the page, this lede was sneaking by:

Less than 6 minutes.

Prosecutors say that was the life span of the full-term, newborn boy whose 19-year-old mother is accused of strangling moments after she gave birth Friday in the employee restroom of a Streamwood Salvation Army store.

So we can get the distinction right in cliche ledes but not in cliche heds? Inquiring minds want to know.

* Don't even start.
** Using "less" here wouldn't make you a bad human being, but them sort of happenings just ain't seamanlike..

Well, that was quick

2011-11-09T15:45:00.001-05:00

That pesky agenda-setting effect of mass media!

... White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told Fox News on Wednesday afternoon that the administration is putting a stop to the proposal.

"I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees. What's being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign, similar to how the dairy producers have created the 'Got Milk?' campaign," he said. "That said, USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action."

"Ridicule" barely begins to cover it, but do feel free to make sport of any parties to this media-policy-public transaction you wish.

And there went out a decree ...

2011-11-09T14:35:00.004-05:00

The short answer is "none." The longer answer -- well, that's why we have a Fair 'n' Balanced Network, isn't it?

Our story so far:

One of Christmas' most recognizable symbols apparently needs a PR campaign -- and a new tax to pay for it.

"One of the most recognizable" -- meaning what? Rudolph? The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? The little dude in swaddling clothes?

The Obama administration has imposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to pay for a new board tasked with promoting the Christmas tree industry.

Aha! That's why we get to run the picture of the scary Kenyan Muslim socialist sizing up his next victim.

The new fee and board were announced in the Federal Register on Tuesday, to be effective Wednesday. According to the Agriculture Department announcement, the government will impose a 15-cent-per-tree charge on "producers and importers" of fresh Christmas trees, provided they sell or import more than 500 trees a year.

The change quickly drew opposition from Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who vowed to fight what he described as a "Grinch" move by the administration. "It is shocking that President Obama tried to sneak through this new tax on Christmas trees," Scalise said in a statement Wednesday.

It might be if he had, but -- oh, hell. Is this giving it away?

The proposed Christmas Tree Promotion, Research, and Information Order (Proposed Order), was submitted to the Department of Agriculture (Department) by the Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force, an industry wide group of producers and importers that support this proposed program.

At least, that's what the Federal Register reported a year ago. The decree did not go out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. The Xpesmasse tree lobby wrote to the Ag Department and asked to be allowed to tax itself, which -- you'd like to think -- is the sort of thing your everyday caesar would be too busy pillaging and looting to concern himself with. What's taking effect today is a test run of this "industry-funded promotion, research, and information program for fresh cut Christmas trees." But that would take all the fun out of it if you're ...

Heritage Foundation Vice President David Addington, who first reported on the rule on his blog Tuesday evening, said there are two problems with the new fee. First, he said it's likely the 15 percent fee will be passed on to consumers. Second, he said it's inappropriate for the government to be putting its "thumb on the scale," helping out the fresh-tree sellers and not the artificial-tree sellers.

Do you wonder if anybody at Fox even asks whether there's a difference between "15 cents" and "15 percent"? Or are you more concerned that nobody's interested in a difference between "think-tank blogs" and "gospel truth"?

When historians come to write up the War on Xpesmasse, this particular skirmish isn't likely to get much attention. It's noted here for two reasons. One, however small the war looks to you, it's an existential struggle for the other side. They are not interested in negotiating, and no farmstead is too small for a little random despoiling and some light war crimes. Be forewarned.

Two, the intellectual wing of the pitchforks-n-torches gang at Fox is given to deducing large social-political conclusions from inconclusive (or simply specious) evidence. The National Review's pet historian, for example, has drawn on the bogus pronoun-count phenomeno n to declare the incumbent guilty of personalizing both policy and the presidency itself. I have yet to see any indication -- or hear a competently made argument -- that Obama personalizes policy more or less than other presidents have, or even why the concept should make me more or less fearful of the Kenyan Muslim apocalypse. That doesn't mean there's nothing worth studying under "personalization"; it means the first place I'd look is the sort of thinking that gives rise to the Two Minues Hate photo and story shown here.

Bring your own gloves

2011-11-08T13:23:00.000-05:00

That pesky comma of direct address! Why does it give Our Nation's Tabloids such fits?

No, you can't say the comma is hidden by the subject's hair. Then I really wouldn't know whether you meant "Come, Clean Mr. Cain" or "Come Clean, Mr. Cain."

Question-beggar's banquet

2011-11-02T00:13:00.000-04:00

Q: At which major national news organization is this actually a story?

A: That's tough. Could it be the one that has a whole beat devoted to ....

The House of Representatives passed a bi-partisan resolution Tuesday night reaffirming “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United STates. The 396-9 vote came at the request of Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) – in part over President Obama’s refusal to correct remarks he made that misstated the motto as “E pluribus unum” instead of “In God We Trust.”

Lawmakers voting against “In God We Trust” include Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich), Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA), Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), and Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA). Voting present were Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Rep. Melvin Watt (D-NC).

I'm inclined to add the War on Christmas to John's evergreen list of holiday bilge to spike on sight. But it's worth noting that in the view of (ahem) some agencies, the War on Christmas is only a skirmish in the main battle. If you cannot bring yourself to ignore those folks, please be sure they are publicly ridiculed at every opportunity.

Forget flood. Interview Mammon.

2011-11-01T10:24:00.001-04:00

A senior clergyman resigned Monday over St. Paul Cathedral's handling of anti-capitalist protesters camped outside the iconic church, the second cleric lost in a tense standoff involving God, mammon and their earthly representatives.

Maybe the LAT doesn't mind spending a few extra lines on the overheated prose, given that it's investing 570 words in the story. But when the provincial press chops things down to the 200-plus range, the morality play in the lede should have been the first thing to go.

The broader point is that newspapers should be careful about taking sides. That's true in empirical disputes and even more so in nonempirical ones. We don't get to proclaim who's on the side of the angels and who's a minion of Basement Cat. We don't rule on which scriptures are divinely revealed, and we don't declare that one set of mortals or another is doing God's work. Period.

You might now ask whether your correspondent has a sense of humor. Yes. And I'll be happy to use it if you write something funny.

I have this further complaint from the longer version of the story:

Together with Westminster Abbey, the domed cathedral is Britain's most famous house of worship. Built in the 17th century by the architect Christopher Wren, it was the site of the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

As random ex cathedra opinions go, the "most famous" here isn't too offensive. I wonder, though, if a wedding 30 years ago is the single most iconic thing we can come up with to explain the fame. (There's the little matter of the Blitz, for example.) That put me in mind of the 1A clip from last week shown here. For a paper that's effectively given up on coverage of the outside world, it's a depressing sign of what it takes --- zomg WILLS AND KATE!!1!!1!!! -- to get an international story on the front page. And if a paper like the LA Times can't run a story about how another advanced English-speaking democracy is handing the Occupy movement without invoking the Windsors, Western Civ is in danger.

5,280 words for "stayin' alive"

2011-10-29T12:40:00.000-04:00

How many words do those wacky Inupiaq have for "awesome," Nation's Newspaper of Record?

The Barrow Journal article on Oct. 17, about the fall subsistence whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska, misstated a greeting exchanged between the captain of a crew that killed a whale and a crowd onshore. They shouted “aarigaa” at each other — an Inupiaq word meaning “very good.” The captain did not shout, and the crowd did not respond, “Ah ah ha!”

You can only hope that the crowd at Barrow High football games isn't given to chanting "Na Na Hey Hey."

And their music? It's just noise!

2011-10-26T08:22:00.000-04:00

Sometimes those pesky popular-culture trends just blow right past the Nation's Newspaper of Record:

The Books of The Times review on Saturday, about “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson, described “Angry Birds,” a popular iPhone game, incorrectly. Slingshots are used to launch birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses, not to shoot down the birds.

Annals of hed gunplay

2011-10-25T19:16:00.000-04:00

Was it just last week we were reminding the Com3210 crowd that "gets shot" heds are always in season if you're looking for presents for your copyed friends? And here comes USA Today with a sterling example.

Double vision

2011-10-24T16:15:00.000-04:00

No, don't think so. At least, not according to the story:

The series of events started about 12:20 p.m. when two cars were involved in a collision on Beatties Ford Road at St. Paul Street. According to police, a patrol officer arrived to block traffic, and the officer's car was then struck by another vehicle.

So it may be true that "two collisions actually took place" (and, needless to say, that "police are investigating the two collisions"), but the officer pretty clearly wasn't injured in both.

It's reassuring to know that the good folks at ACES are aiming more attention at what the research process can tell us about the role of editing. Let me suggest a couple of broad points:
1) Time that goes into enforcing every bogus secret-handshake rule in the AP Stylebook is not well spent.
2) Time spent on taking a deep breath and giving the cop-blotter items a quick read for clarity and common sense before hitting the "publish" button, on the other hand, is rewarded. The people on the receiving end of our prose appreciate it.

Thanks, AP!

2011-10-23T11:03:00.001-04:00

For those of you who woke up believing that Chicago was somewhere between the Panhandle and central Alabama:

CHICAGO (AP) — Anti-Wall Street demonstrators of the Occupy Chicago movement stood their ground in a downtown park in noisy but peaceful defiance of police orders to clear out, prompting 130 arrests early Sunday, authorities said.

Occupy Chicago spokesman Joshua Kaunert vowed after the arrests that protests would continue in the Midwest city.

Thanks, AP! Roboposting helps your parochialism make morons of us all.

Maybe he meant Michael

2011-10-23T10:14:00.000-04:00

Did NPR really just say that Pujols has joined "Babe Ruth and Jesse Jackson" in the elite three-homers-in-a-Series-game club?

Dr. Seuss to the emergency room

2011-10-20T00:02:00.000-04:00

Who was writing the heds over to The Fox Nation this morning?

Mitt Cleans Rick's Clock

Mitt Rings Cain's Bell

It was back to standard fare before long:

Romney Knocks Newt Silly

McConnell Pulverizes Obama

But can we hope for a little more of that monosyllabic Seussism in the future?

An odd way of looking at things

2011-10-16T21:59:00.000-04:00

This AP lede seems to have run more or less untouched at newspapers and websites around the country, so apparently it made sense to somebody, but does anyone else find the phrasing a bit strange?

The decision to pull out fully by January will effectively end more than eight years of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war

Could some of our linguist friends help out here, please? Why do I get the impression that "the Iraq war" was some sort of ongoing concern, like the Big 12, a bar fight or the local food movement, that the U.S. just happened upon and thought it would be interesting to join? Rather than, say, an unprovoked bit of imperial aggression that we've been involved in from the outset because we started it?

I'd hate to think that had just kind of slipped the AP's mind.

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind

2011-10-16T21:22:00.000-04:00

Some classic Timespeak (vintage 1936) for your Sunday evening:

Greatly heartened in this vigilance was SEC by the Roosevelt victory. It meant a clear path for the investment trust regulation which SEC will recommend to the next Congress. It was a full-speed signal for SEC's plan for segregating the function of broker and dealer, conferences with the reluctant New York Stock Exchange on that subject being scheduled for this week. And it was apparently considered a general order to SEC for brisker performance on its regular beat patrolling the U. S. securities business.

Down cracked SEC last week with a restraining order on eight individuals for alleged manipulation of Suburban Electric Securities Co. on the Boston Stock Exchange. Down cracked SEC on the big New York Stock Exchange house of W. E. Hutton & Co. and an Oakland (Calif.) partner of William Cavalier & Co. for alleged manipulation of Atlas Tack, a luckless stock whose gyration once attracted the attention of the New York Attorney General (TIME, Jan. 1, 1933).

Spotted by Garrett, to whom thanks, during the research process.

Stamp out 'police investigate'

2011-10-15T22:00:00.003-04:00

Should we just have a nice old-fashioned rule about this? Any time you find yourself beginning a hed with "Police investigate," back up, delete and start over. No exceptions, no questions. Just do it.

Police investigating southwest Charlotte death
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police homicide detectives are investigating why a woman was found dead in the yard of a southwest Charlotte home early Saturday, after being dropped off at the unoccupied residence by a friend.

Police investigate body found in Steele Creek area
Charlotte Mecklenburg Police are investigating an early morning homicide.*

Here are the broad justifications, should you need them:

1) Whatever the cops are investigating is more interesting than the mere fact that they're investigating it.
2) This will still be true if someone manages to overlook your story for six or eight hours. Real people are not as obsessive about the news as journalists are; if the intarwebs have done anything to journalism that's unambiguously good, it's the conclusive destruction of the cycle paranoia of the three-network era.
3) From which you may conclude that your competition has not stolen a beat on you. Indeed, if the competition is writing "police investigated" and you're writing about what happened, you're ahead -- even if they got there first.

We could talk about the awfulness of the writing that goes along with these heds,* but a look at the pattern of recent weeks is going to give a better idea of when and how fixing the hed should point directly to fixing the lede.

Police investigate Bragg paratrooper's death
Police are investigating the death of a Fort Bragg paratrooper whose body was discovered at his Fayetteville apartment. (Oct. 13)

Police investigate dog fighting incident
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are investigating an incident involving dog fighting in east Charlotte, but one suspect arrested Monday claimed those dogs were just fighting over food. (Oct. 11)

Police investigate 'suspicious device' at ASU
Police in Boone have blocked off traffic and are investigating what they call a suspicious device found near an Appalachian State University building. (Oct. 11)

Police investigate infant's death
Police are investigating the death of an infant girl who was found not breathing Thursday morning at a home just west of Charlotte’s uptown. (Sept. 29)

Police investigate slaying in northeast Charlotte
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are looking for clues in the fatal shooting of a man Monday evening at an apartment on Milton Road in northeast Charlotte. (Sept. 27)

Police investigate child abuse involving three-month-old triplets
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are investigating a case of child abuse involving triplets. (Sept. 20)

Police investigate break-ins at 2 Lincoln schools
Footprints were discovered near an open window Tuesday morning at a Lincoln County elementary school that authorities said was burglarized. (Sept. 13)

Kannapolis police investigate fatal crash
Police are investigating a crash that killed a woman Tuesday afternoon in Kannapolis. (Aug. 30)

Police investigate 2-month-old's death
Statesville police are investigating the death of a 2-month-old after the baby was found unresponsive over the weekend by a babysitter, the Statesville Record & Landmark is reporting. (Aug, 30)

Deputies investigate Lake Wylie bank robbery
Deputies are investigating a possible robbery a Lake Wylie area bank. (Aug. 29)

Police investigate shooting in two-car chase
One person was critically injured when shots were fired from one car to another early Sunday in what police described as an aggressive "moving altercation." (Aug. 28)

Police investigate Cornelius arson
Authorities are investigating a case of arson at a home in Cornelius that police said has previously caught fire under suspicious circumstances. (Aug. 27)

Police investigate fatal shooting in west Charlotte
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are investigating a fatal shooting of a man overnight in a vacant house at 2508 Columbus Circle in west Charlotte. (Aug. 24)

Get the idea? Once your heds talk about outcomes rather than processes, somebody might conclude that your ledes should too. That won't be the end of the War on Editing, or the beginning of the end, but it might indicate the end of the beginning.

* Yes, these are two versions of the same story, both on the homepage: one apparently as written by the TV "news partner," the other given minimal touch-up by the newspaper staff. The War on Editing has taken its toll.
** Whatever the cops are investigating, it isn't "why" the woman was found dead.

All your glorious sun are belong to us

2011-10-13T16:39:00.001-04:00

And farewell to all those high-paids editors too, I guess.

Why are you asking me?

2011-10-11T23:19:00.000-04:00

This sort of story is really the classic argument against the question hed. If you're winding up to a nut graf like this:

Ten years after the attack, an in-depth examination of the case against Ivins by PBS' "Frontline," McClatchy Newspapers and ProPublica raises fresh doubts about the government's evidence and questions whether, despite a $100 million investigation, the real anthrax killer remains on the loose.

... you're the one with the answer, or at least a good approximation of it. So why are you asking me?

The question hed is often an easy way out, so it's worth taking a look at how many papers managed to front the story while still writing a declarative hed. (In no particular order, we have Lexington, Wichita, Raleigh, KC and Fort Worth.) The outlier at lower right is Belleville, which managed to find an even less relevant question to ask.

Please. Only you can prevent the Stupid Question. Do it for the children.

Noun pileup of the morning

2011-10-11T09:40:00.000-04:00

Network radio describes the defendant in the trial that's opening today:

"Accused Christmas Day 2009 Northwest Airlines underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab."

Relative clause of the (still-young) month

2011-10-10T21:49:00.001-04:00

Why teach grammar? Well, partly because we don't want the youngsters to confuse grammar with virtue. You can be grammatical without being loyal, brave, thrifty, reverent, cheerful or obedient, as evidenced in this striking relative clause:

Williams, who was sacked by ESPN last week after more than two decades of supplying the rockin' opening theme song to “MNF” because of controversial comments he made that compared President Barack Obama and House Speaker Rep. John Boehner golfing together to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu playing a round, is singing a new tune: “I'll Keep My ...”

I was sort of hoping there'd be at least one good outcome of the past week's entertaining ideological events: Could we finally -- oh, happy day! -- be rid of "Are You Ready for Some Football?" heds? Dunno. But it appears we have to put up with at least a little more excess publicity for the voracious black hole of country music talent that is Hank Jr.

No, don't

2011-10-10T20:59:00.000-04:00

Did somebody really think this was original enough for the entire front page?

No, don't answer that.

No, but thanks for asking

2011-10-09T09:58:00.002-04:00

Some days, the inane hectoring of America's Columnists is more annoying than others:

In the case of the death of Michael Joseph Jackson (Aug. 29, 1958-June 25, 2009), we are all accessories after the fact.

The fans who fueled his need to keep performing when he wasn't well, who pushed him to be bigger when he was already the greatest, should remember that most of us looked the other way.

To borrow from the Late Dolphin: What are you heaving your poor broken heart at us for? Some of us weren't looking in the first place.

... So when the singer, dancer, songwriter, musician and king of pop was rushed out of his rented Los Angeles mansion, filled with the mixture of drugs he used to make us happy, we looked the other way -- for someone to blame.

He could have kept my share. But in a broader sense -- no. I have an alibi for Elvis (work), the Challenger (sleep) and JFK (second grade), and I'm not taking the fall for this one either. Whether columnists should presume that the entire world shares their taste in music is beside the point; what they really need to avoid is presuming that the entire world shares their inability to compartmentalize.

Opinion writers are paid to have opinions, and it's above the copy editor's pay grade to point out that some opinions ought to be quietly set aside and smothered. But at least we could avoid amplifying them in the hed, you think?

Passive aggressive: Priming

2011-10-09T00:30:00.001-04:00

No one's ever going to accuse The Fox Nation of being a passive sort of place, and that's what makes this hed unusual. (In theory terms, we're primed to expect something particular from it, but you have to sit through some headlines before the punch line). The whole point of Fox Nation is that we know who's doing what to whom. Often that's the bad guys, as in these examples from today's homepage:

DC Organizer Admits to Paying ‘Occupy DC’ Protesters

Pitting Donors One Against Another: Obama Hits New Fundraising Lows

'Occupy Wall Street' Blasts Banking Industry -- but Apologizes to Its Own Banker

Feds Wanted to Give Solyndra More Money, Emails Show

Orrin Hatch: Obama Fuels Riots

Occupy Wall Street Protester Defecates On Police Car

Top Obama Funder Pushed Solyndra Loan From Inside

It's even more fun when the home team is batting, as in these excerpts from recent weeks:

Cain Wipes the Floor With MSNBC News Anchor

Allen West Smacks Down Samuel L. Jackson

O'Reilly Crushes Atheist Richard Dawkins

Hasselbeck Schools Behar in History 101

Noonan Smacks Down Dionne

CEO Blows Away Congressional Hearing

Ryan Schools Schakowsky On How Much Americans Should Be Allowed To Keep

Christie Slaps Around Press

Bush Official Obliterates Code Pink Founder Over Krugman Column

Krauthammer Schools WaPo's King on Obama

O'Reilly Knocks Jay Carney into Next Week

Herman Cain Schools Entire NBC News Panel

Newt Tears Left-Wing Politico Debate Moderator a New One

NBC's Brian Williams Asks Perry About Executions...And Rick Jacks It Out The Park

Santelli Schools Lib Whiz Kid

O'Reilly Blisters Obama

McConnell Knocks Brian Williams' Socialist Question Out of the Park

Paul Ryan Destroys Reid Bill in Blistering Speech

GOP Rep Schools Cokie Roberts

When you do get a passive hed, it's usually because there's no doubt who the evildoers are. The passive isn't being used to hide agency here; it's just foregrounding the bad guys:

Bank Protesters Arrested After Trying to Cash $673-billion Check

And that's why "Romney's faith attacked" is different. We aren't set up for a friendly-fire case:

Texas evangelical leader Robert Jeffress, the Baptist megachurch pastor who introduced Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit, said Friday afternoon he does not believe Mitt Romney is a Christian.

Jeffress described Romney's Mormon faith as a “cult,” and said evangelicals had only one real option in the 2012 primaries.

“That is a mainstream view, that Mormonism is a cult,” Jeffress told reporters here. “Every true, born again follower of Christ ought to embrace a Christian over a non-Christian.”

No doubt there will be more in the ensuing days (as there as been for the past few centuries, so why not). Those who want to fight about such things should go right ahead. Friends of the passive voice, on the other hand, should simply be amused.

Uncle Charley and his head Teddy

2011-10-08T23:00:00.000-04:00

Reader contribution time! Thanks to Brian for this one:

Uncle Charley’s head, two others
confirmed dead in plane crash

Charles Armitage, Jr., the president of Uncle Charley’s Sausage Co. in Vandergrift, Pa., is among three confirmed deaths in a plane crash in West Virginia, according to media reports Friday.

And a nice bit of hyphenless ambiguity from Robert:

Charges dismissed for baby rat eater
Clarified in the lede:
A Utah judge dismissed an animal cruelty charge against a man depicted eating a baby rat in a video posted to YouTube.

... but for best results, hang on until the last graf:

Prosecutors argued the rat was a domesticated animal and "eating a live, baby rat on a dare is not an accepted husbandry practice."

Heds always welcome.

Ground control to Maj. Alinsky

2011-10-06T00:44:00.000-04:00

It's time for another visit to The Fox Nation, that happy outpost where Fox readers can go when the mothership is bending over a little too far backward to accommodate the scary Kenyan Muslim socialist in the White House. Headlines mandatory; facts optional.

Hed writing, as you've probably gathered by now, is a pretty patterned sport. There are rules about how things are named, which verbs can be elided, whether corners can be cut, and where in the article the headline should come from. If you're new to the game, the answer to the last one is "really, really high." Here's the text:

In early November, NASA will seek applicants for its next class of astronaut candidates, hoping to bolster its reserves of brave spacemen -- in the face of a National Research Council report that warned the corps was getting too small.

Fox Nation cut the lede of the original FoxNews tale -- "What do YOU want to be when you grow up?" -- but kept the charming "brave spacemen," even though we've had Gals in Space for nearly five decades now.* There's a reason for that. Fox World is a happier place when we can just put that pesky inclusive-language stuff aside and talk like men. Ever wondered why Fox goes to the trouble of turning "Quran" and "Muhammad" in AP stories back to "Koran" and "Mohammed," which the AP abandoned a decade ago? Same reason. Darn girls. Darn foreigners. Bad enough we have to let 'em into our stories in the first place.

Anyway! Wondering why there's been no mention of forced Russian training yet? It doesn't show up until the 10th graf of the Fox story (these two are the last ones shown at Fox Nation):

Beyond the extra-vehicular activity, robotics, and flight training, Russian language training is a part of today's astronaut training.

"English is the agreed-to language in space," Ross told FoxNews.com, but due to the close collaboration with the Russian space agency, it's helpful for American spacemen to speak Russian.

How did we get from "training" and "helpful" to "required to speak Russian"? In about the same way the news migrated from the 10th graf to the hed! Does "required to speak Russian" mean some terrifying fluency level that has to be reached before you enter training, or a few days of classes in which you learn "yes," "no" and "which one is the bathroom?" Who cares? The real point is "Obamanauts," which makes sense if you're primed to process all this information in light of Obama's plot to turn NASA into a Muslim outreach program last year. Let's see what the audience has to say:

Why bother....the space station will probably fall to earth now that there are no shuttles missions to take supplies to them. does this make the mu....s...lims feel good about themselves obama?

Preparing for a Russian takeover of our space program - or the Chinese???

Took Ragan and other presidents years to get the USSR down . Only took Obama 2 1/2 years in front of Putin

I thought our Astronauts were discontinued, and NASA is relegated to Climate Gate, so they can lie to us in Russian

The next Worlds language

What's Next Mexican, N0 Wait M00slim?

thanks barry.... more of YOUR hope and change!

Next he will want us all to speak Arabic.

More Obooba subservience.

How incredibly shameful The United States is now a space hitchhiker.It took 50 years for the Russians to beat us in space and it is not because we can't do better it is because we quit trying. because of liberals in government, SAD SAD

I figured they would need to speak Arabic since Obama gave NASA a new mission of lsIam outreach. This must be an effort to give more Muslims the opportunity to go up into space. And that's a good thing. Were it up to me, I'd send all MusIims up into space.

See? Everything that's gone wrong in your life for the last three years really is the fault of that awful colored guy and his media minions!

*Dern Russians beat us to that too.

I'll bet they do

2011-10-05T22:46:00.000-04:00

Is this an example of the Miracle of Roboposting, or is something else going on at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

Oil, that is

2011-10-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

How nice that some writers have temporarily given up the "that's what" lede. Unfortunately, the "that is" lede isn't much of an improvement.

Please be embarrassed

2011-10-04T23:53:00.000-04:00

What does it take for international news to make the front pages of America's Daily Newspapers? Oh, go figure it out for yourself. (Hint: It helps to watch a lot of Fox News.)

Now. Quite a few papers aren't included in the snapshot above. Those would be the ones who said something on the order of "American acquitted." (The Austin fishwrap put it best: "Italian court clears U.S. woman in lurid slaying," in that "lurid slaying" is what our friends at the tabloids have been telling us all along.) They still put the story on the front, but at least they maintained a bit of a polite fiction: OMG one of Our Innocents is escaping the claws of furrin justice!

The papers shown above are in a different class. (Except for the Post, holding down the lower left corner, which really is a tabloid.) You lot -- the Strib, Buffalo, the R-J, Anchorage, Raleigh, Richmond, USAT, Charlotte, Tampa, Norfolk -- really? Amanda Knox is a headline name? At the top of the front?

That isn't nearly as embarrassing as it should be. The Local Anesthesia movement has been relentless in driving that pesky grownup news into hiding; exclusive, original content is the franchise, the argument goes, because readers can get tales of faraway places anywhere. The Knox story really gives the lie to that line of thinking. It's not the cause of news audiences' cluelessness toward how the outside world works, but it's a pretty clear example of how news organizations deliberately, happily encourage that cluelessness.

War on Editing

2011-10-02T11:05:00.000-04:00

Today's dispatches from the front include a case of Instant Metaphor Mix (just add cliches):

As political hot cakes go, Gov. Rick Perry's support for his state's guarantee of lower cost in-state tuition for illegal immigrants attending Texas' public universities sizzled at a recent Republican presidential debate.

Next is an illustration of the S&W maxim about putting stuff in positive form. That doesn't mean news should be exclusively about puppies and kittens and birthday cake; it means you generally get to the point quicker -- and with less chance of confusion -- if you talk about what is, rather than about what isn't:

Following Michigan State's 10-7 victory over Ohio State on Saturday, it's probably no longer a question of if Luke Fickell isn't retained as Buckeyes coach, but a matter of when.

The sentence would work with "fired" or "dismissed" (surely no one would want to make the verb active): It's not a question of if he's fired but when. But pinning down when something didn't happen is a lot harder than saying when it did.

The next one, I think, is a scope issue. The main clause is vague, but the relative clause demands that it be specific:

For at least 12 years, a charming, well-dressed man moved from woman to woman, who accuse him of leaving behind empty bank accounts, black eyes and raw fear.

None of these are unfixable. None of them would take very long to straighten out. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that the writers might appreciate the help. But if we don't build in the time and the staffing that would make even minimal editing possible, our first rough draft of history is going to look rougher all the time.

Why we teach this stuff

2011-10-01T23:08:00.002-04:00

People still ask, especially when we're getting ready to take the whole curric- ulum apart and see if we can fit it back together in some plausibly 21st-century way, whether we ought to keep on teaching those annoying grammar terms. (Especially the test.) Isn't there other stuff we ought to be teaching instead, and do you really have to know all that pluperfect stuff to be a journalist anyway?

Well -- no. You don't. Indeed, there are large parts of journalism in which diagramming seems a pretty low-order skill. But if you want to traffic in the written parts, you can't go too long before that pesky grammar comes in handy. You might want to keep someone from doing something boneheaded to your copy, for example. Or you might want to talk one of your writerly friends out of writing him- or herself into a corner -- in a way that keeps you from having to fix the same mistake again and again and again. Or you might find yourself on the receiving end of a rant like this, delivered to the AP Stylebook's Ask The Editor feature:

Q: ... Here's another question: Someone makes comments; the comments don't come or go anywhere, do they? Who teaches this form of formulaic and idiomatic but nonsense writing? It seems to be more prevalent than it was only a few years ago, but it's irritating to this copy editor. (AP story) "Haley's remarks came after the Budget and Control Board, a financial oversight panel she chairs, agreed without discussion to require the Department of Transportation to provide more details of a summer financial meltdown that left contractors with invoices unpaid for months." – from Arlington, Va. on Mon, Sep 26, 2011
A: Point taken. The passive voice and complex structure make the sentence unduly challenging. I suspect we're all guilty of this at times.

No, point not taken. Point apparently not even attended to. The question is complaining about the "came" in the main clause, on grounds that comments can't behave like other nouns. A better answer would be: It's your mud flat, Yertle. You can ban any verbs you want to. You can ban whole parts of speech. But if you want somebody to help you declare a usage like "Haley's remarks came after ..." to be "nonsense," we've got other stuff to do. Consult your physician if the peeve lasts more than four hours, and have a look at the dictionary.

By extensions ... things are said to come in one's way, to come within one's reach, to come under one's notice, to come within the scope of a measure, and the like; also to come in a particular position or order with relation to contiguous things, to inclusion in a classification, etc., as to come on such a page of a book, to come before or after other things, to come under a heading, etc.

There's more. Does the passive voice really help make the sentence "unduly challenging"?

Haley's remarks came after the Budget and Control Board, a financial oversight panel she chairs, agreed without discussion to require the Department of Transportation to provide more details of a summer financial meltdown that left contractors with invoices unpaid for months.

Leaving out the infinitives, I get four verbs, none of them passive. If the goal was to reduce complexity, you could start by turning the last relative clause into a passive sentence of its own: "Contractors were left with unpaid invoices for months," but that's piling on.

The original is not a great sentence, but it's hard to open an AP story of any size without finding one that's equally "challenging." If there's anything we're all guilty of, it's writing the occasional (or more than occasional) gloppy, silly, crappy sentence. We have a much better chance of beating those sentences into shape if we're not wasting time on random peeving and fearful genuflections before bloodstained grammar idols we can't even describe.

That's why we still teach this stuff, and that's why the semester begins with how to use references (and why their last name isn't "dot.com"). We need the time.

War on Xpesmasse: Fifth column edition

2011-09-29T22:47:00.000-04:00

Yes, the War on Christmas has come early -- and look who's giving aid and comfort to the enemy with a "Happy Holidays."

Boxers or briefs, Sen. Dole?

2011-09-29T16:27:00.000-04:00

Sorry, but there are times when the cursed ambiguity created by commercial speech just hits me the wrong way.

Don't you miss upstyle heds sometimes? "Yes, No, Depends"?

And your point is ... ?

2011-09-27T00:27:00.000-04:00

A reader writes to ask, basically (and quite understandably), wtf?

Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco. Sungmin Jang left his name, his culture and his career in South Korea to bet his future on the United States of America, but he's not complaining.

The reader's a Philadelphian living in San Francisco, and thus particularly baffled by the reference, but I can share the concern. When a gun comes on stage in the first act, you expect it to go off by the fifth, and when a pop-culture cliche gets you into the lede, you rather expect it to be artfully woven back in by the conclusion.

This one doesn't. There's nothing else in the column to indicate why the particular act of leaving some specific heart in San Francisco, out of all those leavings immortalized in popular song*, was an appropriate setup for this column. Ideally, some kind editor would have reminded the columnist that his lede would have been just as good without the, you know, lede-y parts, and all would have been well.

We get the impression, though, that this columnist doesn't get edited very hard:

For Asians, qualifying for citizenship is especially difficult. In addition to a new language and customs, they must learn a new alphabet.

Yep. No funny-looking alphabets in Europe or Africa!

Most of us -- let's just go ahead and make that "all of us" -- write better when we have someone reading behind us. Not just to catch those pesky typos and the inevitable syntactic flub, but to ask, every now and then: What the hell is that supposed to mean?

* Hard to believe J.D. Crowe was that young, isn't it?

You don't know Jack

2011-09-22T10:20:00.001-04:00

Because deep down inside, they all really do look alike, dion't they?

FOY 'early'

2011-09-20T14:05:00.000-04:00

Q: Is it still a Forbidden Hed if the lede says "Christmas Mountains"?
A: Yes, and even if the last line is "Acquiring the Christmas Mountains, he said, was like 'jingle bells, baby!'” Why do you ask?

(Thanks to Language Czarina, who brought this one in with the mail the other day.)

Yes and no

2011-09-19T23:46:00.000-04:00

One question in a hed is usually too many, and two is -- well, do the math and then add some zeroes.

Questions, if you have to use them, should at least be real questions. They should be exclusive: "Boxers or briefs?" poses a choice that "threat or menace?" doesn't. And they should, ideally, be literal, or at least only open to one interpretation (literal or figurative) at a time. The answer to "Is sky the limit at air shows?" depends on which you mean:

Yes; otherwise they'd be called space shows!
Yes, because the sky's always the limit in America!
No, because "the sky's the limit" means there are no limits!

Which makes it hard to see why this is on the upper-right side of the front, traditional home of "news," but onward.

If the first question is false, the second is irrelevant. Of course the "quest for thrills" is endangering the public. That's one of the things it does! Your individual risk of being decapitated at any particular motorsport event is pretty small, and it's not markedly different today than it was yesterday or a decade ago, but it's still there, just as it always was.

So the answers to the heds are something like "not really" and "so what?" Or maybe "so what?" and "not really." When the meaningless answers are as interchangeable as the questions, you might want to think about another hed.

Annals of "that's what": It isn't official

2011-09-17T23:35:00.001-04:00

What happens when you negate one of the Great Cliches? Do the skies darken and the rivers run backward if your lede says "Christmas didn't come early" or "it's not official" -- or, in the present case, "Dead! That's what the man wasn't when police found him"? Let's see.

This lede never should have been let out to play, much less (notwithstanding the Sentinel's obsession with promoting every menu change put forth by these chains) found its way to the 1A centerpiece. It confuses a cliche attributed to the walk-in fast-food trade -- "you want fries with that?" -- with the routines of the sit-down trade, and that can't end well. Thus it paints itself into a corner: It takes something that already isn't happening and tells us it won't be happening in the future. The drama can barely be contained.

"Put statements in positive form" is another Strunkenwhite-ism that's easy to deride from the ivory tower but worth keeping in mind for day-to-day writing. It doesn't mean we limit ourselves to writing about puppies, kittens and birthday cake. It means that in many, if not most, cases, your lede is going to get to the point more quickly and be more interesting if it talks about what is, rather than about what isn't.

Zombie Thurber

2011-09-15T07:45:00.000-04:00

The "that's what" lede takes on a new and more exciting twist in this morning's top story from downtown.

Just imagine the possibilities:

Undead.

That's what half of Woodlawn Cemetery seemed to be as the earthly remains of former bankers, lawyers and rock stars shambled toward Palmer Park in a grotesque parody of a Labor Day parade.

Other contributions?

Mixed signals

2011-09-13T17:02:00.001-04:00

Well, we all know who(m) to blame for that development, don't we? Let's ask the commenters:

Nice photo. Where did he go next in his million dollar limo? How many body guards did he have around him? Or what high class resort did he and michelle vacation too next? Which high class hotel did he buy out the floors for, for protection purposes of course? How many jets were needed to hold his minions to get this photo.? In other words how much did this photo cost the tax payers of this country?

Oh, where would we be without this President? Where would we be, he cares about America so very much.?

Barry hob knobs with the filthy rich union bosses at Martha's vinyard while America sinks deeper into poverty. Sick fukk

I hope you at least learned a lesson that you should have learned years ago. Judge people by their actions not there words/speeches. He had no experience and still has no experience.

"Oh dank you for da food Mr. President, dank you, dank you. Now where's da line for da free money?"

You white boys and girls got scr--d the country is gone,What are you going to do , nothing

this is all under the regime of the boy king..we are a broke nation.. all because of this sandmonkey...so blame some one that has been gone for 3 and a half years when the boy king has had 3 and a half years to sink us so far down that their is no hope we can come out of this in our life times

You can see why it's an irresistible combination for the top of the Fox page (though it was rather quickly nudged down to second place,* with a photo of the line at a job fair in Atlanta last month replacing the Obama shot). And it probably got to where it was without a lot of prompting from the glass offices. As Warren Breed noted in "Social Control in the News Room" (1955), people rarely have to be told directly what a story ought to look like. They learn from what lands on the front page, what happens to their own copy, who yells what at whom across the room, what befalls an editor who fails to give a sacred cow its due, and all the other stuff that goes on in day-to-day life.

Another interesting bit of evidence is -- golly, wonder what the cousins over at National Review ("Strange facts about America's 'poor'") are saying about this development:

This morning, the Census Bureau announced that a record 46.2 million, or one in seven Americans, lived in poverty last year. ... But there is a wide chasm between the public’s concept of poverty and “poverty” as it is defined by the Census Bureau.

... Why the disconnect? The answer: Public perception of poverty in the U.S. is governed by the mainstream media, which invariably depicts the Census Bureau’s tens of millions of poor people as chronically hungry and malnourished, homeless or barely hanging on in overcrowded, dilapidated housing.

The strategy of the media is to take the least fortunate 3 percent or 4 percent of the poor and portray their condition as representative of most poor Americans. While we must have compassion for those who are truly homeless or without food, they are far from typical among the poor.

How do the poor live? For starters, a poor child in American is far more likely to have a widescreen plasma television, cable or satellite TV, a computer and an Xbox or TiVo in his home than he is to be hungry.

Silly rabbit! Poverty isn't an Obama story! It's a story about how the conniving media are plotting to make you forget that the first thing Those People do with their money is buy a ~~Cadillac~~ wide-screen TV. No surprise, then that the people on the ground knew right away what the story "should" look like. The surprise -- and what I'd say is the better indicator of someone reaching down from on high -- is how quickly Fox realized that it had gotten the party line backwards on the front page.

Breed's on the reading list for Wednesday night (along with Gaye Tuchman and James Carey). Advance comments welcome.

* UPDATE: As of this writing (5:38p Eastern), it's been demoted to a refer under the #2 story.

Three to beam up

2011-09-11T23:04:00.000-04:00

Q: Even the Times?
A: Yes, even the Times:

An earlier version misstated the source for the term replicator, which Mr. Hart adopted to describe how e-books would allow for the infinite reproduction of books. It comes from the television show “Star Trek,” not the film “Star Wars.”

Regular reader Garrett wonders if this isn't the sort of thing that copy editors used to catch. Yes. Yes, they did. We can never tell whether any individual error would have been caught (that's life in the probability lane), but we can confidently say there's a higher chance this one would have been nailed in better days.

Why he no?

2011-09-11T18:27:00.000-04:00

Ah, the woes of upstyle.

Well, and the woes of sticking to the "no articles" rule even when the article would give the old parser a well-deserved break.* And of not hyphenating compounds that have been hyphenated since the early 19th century (exemplified in current usage, not to rub it in or anything, by whoever wrote the hed on the homepage).

And -- at Fox, of all places! -- of quoting Marx in heds.

* That's why Your Editor collects heds of the form "Smith gets shot at tourney."

Six million-dollar men

2011-09-09T00:43:00.002-04:00

Today's quiz: How many bones, and how old?

If you get to look at the picture accom- panying the story, it's a little easier, and there's also a clue if you see the cutline: the number appears midsentence, so you get a bit of a style bump from "2 million-year-old" rather than "two million-year-old." But it's hard to avoid reminding people that most hyphenation rules, however good they are for however vast a majority of cases, need a footnote on the order of "Break this rule if you're at risk of looking dumb."

We're into the second week of the semester, so today was the first chance to talk about ambiguity. Much of the grammar that editors deal with isn't "bad" or "wrong" as much as it is right about several things at once. Here are a couple examples of what happens when modifiers go feral:

Former Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan

Former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords

Both look pretty standard in hed terms, and they're both "right" -- they're just right in different ways about different things. Good editors would make sure the audience knew that former Gov. Mel Carnahan was a Democrat and that former Republican Jim Jeffords was a senat0r.

What does that have to do with millions -- and with whether we're talking about two bones, each a million years old, or a set of bones of indeterminate number but clearly around 2 million years old? It's a matter of style. AP style bans the hyphen in million and billion compounds; Freep style demands it. Usually, for a lot of reasons, AP's style is better (if nothing else, the dollar sign makes "$7 million budget" clear in a direct way that "7 million-dollar budget" isn't). In rare cases, Freep style wins, and "two-million-year-old bones" is one.

Good editors think with the brain. They follow style in nearly all cases because, among other reasons, style is a time-saver. Why fight about whether it's "10 p.m." or "10PM" when you can flip to a perfectly good decision made decades ago and settle it? But in the 5 percent of cases where the style rule will cause a demonstrably stupid result, good editors are the ones who say "don't apply that rule." They really don't care if the AP Stylebook gang is shocked -- shocked! -- to find random hyphens in headlines. They care about whether the end product makes sense to the people buying it. And that often entails quietly throwing a few AP rules over the side.

"9/11" is not an excuse for silly

2011-09-08T01:07:00.002-04:00

Hard to say who's more at fault here -- a Washington Bureau reporter who has no idea what he's writing about, or a desk that fails to challenge the reporter's cluelessness, then amplifies it in a first-person headline. Let's get straight to the point:

When terrorists attacked New York and Washington in 2001, the Middle East was firmly in the control of authoritarian leaders. Some of them were staunch allies of the United States who tolerated the growing threat from Osama bin Laden.

Irrelevant to the extent it's true, and false to the extent it's relevant, but go on.

A decade later, bin Laden is dead, al-Qaida has been set back and the autocrats in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan and, at least for now, Yemen have been swept from power by their own people — a series of sometimes deadly protests and battles now known as the Arab Spring.

OK. This should be a hint. "Spring" doesn't last 10 years. (The "Prague spring" began in spring, but it wasn't spring 1958). Conflating the US invasion of Afghanistan with the "Arab spring" -- let alone the killing of bin Laden and assorted setbacks to the Qaida organization -- is the sort of breathless fawning that gave the Dispatch of old its reputation as a happy prancing tool of the hard Republican right.

Although analysts are deeply divided about whether U.S. policy brought about this remarkable transformation, they say that the U.S. is safer today than when the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed and nearly 3,000 Americans died at the hands of terrorists.

Yes, I think we can say by definition that we're safer when people aren't killing us at Blitz-level rates than when they are. But we need to narrow down which "remarkable transformation" we're talking about. No one's "divided" over the US role in sweeping the Taliban from power (though you could get a pretty good argument if you insist on counting Mullah Omar in the same class of autocrats as Mubarak or Ben Ali, and if you're scoring along at home, you've probably noticed that the Taliban weren't "swept out by their own people"). That was the point of the invasion, and it worked.

What US policy had to do with the "Arab spring," on the other hand, is a topic of debate. If you are desperate to find some benefit among the multiple fatuous justifications for the 2003 Iraq debacle, you might claim the set of uprisings called the "Arab spring" are an ordained reflection of US policy decisions. If you're a grownup,* on the other hand, you might lean more toward a naturalistic explanation: Sometimes those pesky natives get tired of the dirtbags in power and take matters into their own hands. That's a debate. It may not be a very good one, but at least it's a debate. With that, let's go back to our reporter:

... In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack, Bush articulated a new U.S. strategy that would promote democracy, saying that “as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.’’

... When Obama took office in 2009, he showed little enthusiasm for Bush’s approach, giving only tepid support in 2009 to Iranians protesting the apparently fraudulent outcome of that country’s presidential election.

That's a convenient elision. Bush's "approach" to democracy is best exemplified by the irrational, destructive and stupid invasion of Iraq. One of the many reasons it was stupid was its effect on the neighborhood. What's the most important lesson Iran learned from the invasion? That if some loony in Washington sets out to bully his electorate into thinking you have a nuclear weapon and pose an existential threat to Our Way of Life, you might as well go ahead and have a few, because sweet reason** isn't going to head off a pretty nasty combined-arms war in which a lot of your civilians will die.*** If the Dispatch thinks that outcome has somehow "left us safer," it needs to start looking into beachfront property and bridges into Brooklyn.

It's kind of regrettable to point all this out. America is a big country, and it'd actually be a good idea if newspapers in state capitals and major population centers could write competently about issues of public significance. The Dispatch ought to get a little credit for not just waiting for a wire service to tell it what it thinks. Fine. Let's encourage that -- but let's be sure that when writers produce clueless partisan swill, they're sent back to try again before they're rewarded with a 1A spot. Even if, or especially if, they've already been awarded a spot in your Washington bureau.

* The Dispatch insists on calling this a "left-leaning" view. It isn't, and if the Dispatch doesn't want to be mistaken for its old self too often, it would do well to buy a clue.
** Or -- not to put too fine a point on it -- a massive off-the-books federal spending deficit that you can then blame on the scary colored socialist Muslim dude from Kenya.
*** Can you believe that a fairly substantial body of right-wing opinion favored John Bolton as a presidential nominee?

Flies in my beard

2011-09-06T23:52:00.000-04:00

Within this story is a candidate for Most Profound Paragraph to Slide Right By a Living, Breathing Editor of the Still-Young Century:

A website calls Kansas City “a hotbed of UFO activity.”

I wonder how long it would to take to find a website that calls the Kansas City Star a hotbed of deep-catalog moronhood that actually justifies dumping any remaining McClatchy stock in the portfolio, even if that means paying people to take it, on the chance that, should you cross the bar unexpectedly, your far-distant relatives will make endless fun of your heirs and assigns for having been dear to someone who ever cashed a McClatchy check in the first place. Oh, wait.

Granted, America's Newspapers have a habit of ignoring common sense, their own eyes and all sorts of things they should have learned in junior high school when the occasional UFO story rolls in. That's not much of an excuse, even when USA Today does it, and it doesn't get any better when the familiar nonsense is tricked out with local names and clever references to area landmarks. The UFO tale should be quietly sent off to sleep the big sleep, whenever it occurs, no exceptions.

It's bad enough to find this at the top of the Sunday frontpage, but there's worse. When you set your standard for top-of-the-front coverage to "something is out there," you don't have much to distinguish yourself from -- well, say, the Washington Times and its coverage of the APSA convention!

Tea party leaders laughed off the scrutiny and chuckled when they heard the names of the papers.

“This is good. You’re making my day,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.

“Statistics show that the vast number of folks that are in the world of academia are liberals,” he said after collecting himself. “Liberals don’t like the tea party movement. I don’t think that’s news.”

“From my perspective, they’ve literally become a caricature of themselves,” he said of the academy, adding that there are a “few exceptions.”

See the problem? You don't judge the likelihood of alien invasion by whether Local People too have seen the triangular lights, and you don't judge the validity and reliability of somebody's multivariate analysis of what stuff predicts other stuff by asking people to call academics funny names. The Star isn't being openly corrupt in the way the WashTimes is, but it's being stupid in the same way. If you want to keep the barbarians away from the gates, you don't want to spend a lot of time explaining why you made all the other barbarians welcome.

Now fall over!

2011-09-01T17:57:00.000-04:00

What better present for the first day of a new editing class than one of those classic cases of pin-the-prepositional-phrase-on-the-donkey ambiguity?

And if you still aren't convinced of the utility of the passive voice in cop tales, there's the inside hed: "Man with toy gun shot, killed by police." Now go forth and break some icons.

Maybe you asked the wrong doctor

2011-09-01T15:53:00.000-04:00

A soda a day doesn't keep obesity away -- that's as may be. But since it isn't what the story's about, and since nobody in the story says it, do you suppose there might have been some mildly more clueful way of using the display type to justify this not-especially-relevant survey's place on the front page?

That minx!

2011-08-28T23:23:00.001-04:00

Ahem:

Hurricane Irene sloshed and blew her way ashore early Saturday at the southeastern coast, bringing localized flooding, downed trees, power outages and contributing to a possible drowning.

No. Hurricane Irene might have sloshed and blown its way ashore, but it did not blow her way ashore, because tropical cyclones don't have gender, and we have neuter pronouns for the very purpose of describing things like hurricanes without sounding -- well, antediluvian.

Even the AP Stylebook, hardly on the cutting edge of inclusive language, has said so from the outset. This is from 1977, the first year the Stylebook appeared as a full-size guide to normative news language (and two years before Atlantic hurricanes first got male names*):

... Use it and its -- not she, her or hers -- in pronoun references. And do not use the presence of a woman's name as an excuse to attribute sexist images of women's behavior to a storm. Avoid, for example, such sentences as: The fickle Hazel teased the Louisiana coast.**
Good point. The AP won't come right out and say it, but you're pretty much "attributing sexist images" as soon as you use the gendered pronoun. Might as well go ahead and write the way the grownups do.

I don't mean to suggest that AP style is handed down from Sinai, or that it's always better than house style, or that good writers should be broken on the wheel of the stylebook until all the creativity is drained from them. I would suggest that people who mistake knee-jerk sexism for creativity are probably missing the point from the outset.

* I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I still have an especially delightful Durham Herald hed in my collection from that period: "Floridians Alerted to Eye Lusty Fred"
** Except for the addition of male pronouns to the caution list (not that I can think of any cases of stereotypical male behavior to tropical weather over the past three decades), the entry is basically unchanged since 1977 -- Hurricane Hazel and all. It's sometimes interesting to reflect on how much the AP still lives in the three-channel world.

March of the pronouns

2011-08-25T00:47:00.000-04:00

No peeking now -- who did what to whom? And for bonus points, is there a reason you'd be interested?

His job was to protect him from physical harm.

Now, he's potentially shielding him from a $2.5-million lawsuit.

Lucky thing there's a third graf:

Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. has landed in the middle of a civil lawsuit that claims former Detroit Pistons star Allen Iverson instigated a bar brawl that left an Ohio man with a permanent eye injury.

It makes more sense in the online version published the previous day:

Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee has come to the defense of former Detroit Pistons star Allen Iverson in a $2.5-million civil lawsuit involving a bar fight.

Sensible enough that -- you know, you wonder why it wasn't in the newspaper, rather than the pronoun feast we got. I think it's the fear of the first-day lede again. The old media are so obsessed with their oldness that they forget something important: News is supposed to be interesting for its own sake. In a procedural event for which the details a day later are identical to the ones in play at the first flush of publication, you might as well get to the point.

For some readers, after all, it's the first time they've seen the story. For others, don't assume that they need the thing dressed up -- especially when fashion design skills are in short supply.

And don't do this either

2011-08-24T17:11:00.000-04:00

Q: Is it still a forbidden hed if it's in the NYT?

A: Why, is there some reason it wouldn't be?

Stop doing this

2011-08-23T23:44:00.002-04:00

Tell you what. Let's stop writing this headline now, and then we won't have to write it again every day through Saturday.

To review the bidding, here's the relevant graf from Monday's story:

The National Hurricane Center's official forecast is for Irene to be a 115-mph hurricane when it makes landfall early Saturday near Myrtle Beach, but meteorologists cautioned that much of the coast -- from south Florida up to the Outer Banks -- could be the landfall site.

By Tuesday morning (shown), forecasters had "shifted the bulls-eye of Hurricane Irene northward* to the Wilmington area." And by evening:

The focus of preparations for Hurricane Irene moved up the Carolinas coast Tuesday, with forecasters now saying the worst of the storm will slam into the Outer Banks.

If you're starting to see a pattern, you can guess what follows:

But meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center once again reminded the public that the forecast track of the storm could shift in either direction.

That's not entirely true. More likely, they "reminded the public" that there's more than one direction a storm can shift in, and over the next four or five days, there's a pretty good chance it will shift in several of them.

How good of a chance is a different question, and there's where journalism needs to set aside its drive to be authoritative, certain and up-to-the-minute and actually indulge in a little probability-based reasoning. Here's how the National Hurricane Center describes the "cone" that contains the "probable path of the storm's center":

NHC tropical cyclone forecast tracks can be in error. This forecast uncertainty is conveyed by the track forecast "cone", the solid white and stippled white areas in the graphic. The solid white area depicts the track forecast uncertainty for days 1-3 of the forecast, while the stippled area depicts the uncertainty on days 4-5. Historical data indicate that the entire 5-day path of the center of the tropical cyclone will remain within the cone about 60-70% of the time.

So about two-thirds of the time, the center of the storm will be somewhere within the cone for all five days of the forecast -- based on how tropical cyclones have behaved before. That's interesting and important. If I was deciding whether to lay in some bread and water or to see if any relatives on higher ground were willing to put up with me for a few days, I'd call it substantially more important than a pile of inane chatter about whether the notional "bulls-eye" had shifted a few dozen miles in the forecast for Saturday. Indeed, if I was still living on the southern N.C. coast and you had shown the ability to understand how margins of error work, I'd be a fairly attentive reader right now.

Believe it or not, people still pay attention to the "legacy media" when there's a potential disaster in the offing. They may pay attention to your newspaper's website or its Twitter feed rather than the dead-trees product, but they're paying attention to you for a reason. If you want them to keep paying attention, be useful. Don't spin your wheels on crying wolf -- they notice -- when you could be providing actual information. And if it makes you feel better, "study says."

* More like east-northeast, but that side of the state has always been foreign territory to the Observer..

So -- what kind of doctor are you?*

2011-08-22T10:25:00.001-04:00

Shurely some kind of comma is still customary between the parts of the compound predicate? (First flagged by JKaufman at TCEs.)

On a related note: The little plot summaries at Netflix frequently make him "Who" on second reference. That seems to be carrying AP style a little too far.

* Worth the wait here.

And the problem with this is ...?

2011-08-20T23:37:00.000-04:00

I'm of several minds about the top story in Saturday's Sun-Sentinel.

Naturally, I'm pleased when the long arm of the law reaches out and touches people who make off with other people's money. The paper seems a bit overimpressed with the sheer number of zeroes; on the old comfort-the-afflicted principle, it'd be nice to know that the paper is ready to stand up for people who are scammed out of $20 in the same way it's standing up for people scammed out of $20 million. But there appears to be a bigger problem here, and it's a problem with substance.

I guess we need to spell it out for our friends in Fort Lauderdale: Fraud is what fortune tellers do. It's in the job description. People come to you with a problem, you look at some sheep livers or a spread of cards or the flight of birds, you tell them what to do, you take their money. Nice work if you can get it.

There is, of course, an annoying First Amendment problem. If you advertise readings from sheep livers, spreads of cards and the like and someone comes along with a few dollars, or a few million, and wants to know what the livers and cards and the like say about dear departed Aunt Harriet, you're perfectly entitled to tell them and take their money in return. That pesky lack of correlation between what the livers and cards say and Aunt Harriet's fate in the hereafter doesn't signify. The mark paid for a reading, you provided a reading, and small business is the engine of job creation Amen.

Can you see why the Sun-Sentinel ought to be a little cautious?

Among the victims was a bestselling author who gave an estimated $20 million to the family. The woman, who prosecutors refused to identify, lost her 8-year-old son in a motorcycle accident and was allegedly exploited by at least one of the defendants, Rose Marks, who she considered a friend.

"She was under, for want of a better word, the curse of Rose Marks," Assistant U.S. Attorney Laurence Bardfeld told the judge at the hearing in federal court in West Palm Beach. The fortune teller reportedly told the author that her son was "somewhere between heaven and hell."

Imagine that. A fortune teller facing federal charges for suggesting that a minor child was caught "somewhere between heaven and hell" and that, you know, maybe a little scratch could tip the scales. Hope nobody's thinking about running for office on a Faith 'n' Values platform.

... While some may scoff that people gave cash, gold coins, jewelry and other valuables to the fortune tellers, Bardfeld told the judge the victims were going through very vulnerable phases of their lives.

This is a grammar issue. I can't tell whether "some may scoff" is the reporter's opinion or the prosecutor's opinion. If you want to pin it to someone else, we have some well-established syntactic signals for that. Give them some thought.

"If you understood the severity of what these victims were going through, it makes more sense," Bardfeld said. They were told that if they didn't follow the psychics' advice, terrible things would happen to them or the people they cared about, he said.
"More sense" isn't the problem; everybody knows that people aren't at their decision-making best under stress. The question, I think, is who we're going to haul in for questioning if the threat of terrible supernatural consequences for dead or living relatives is the corpus delicti here.

We could go on. In a sentence like Most of those charged are members of the Marks family, a so-called Romanian gypsy clan whose members were born and grew up in the United States, we can't tell what the writer's problem is. Does she not believe that there's such a thing as a "Romanian gypsy clan," or does she not think the defendants qualify as one?

... "From the people I've interviewed so far, I've found nobody pleased with their services," Stack testified.

Well, there's a challenge. If reading sheep livers is an allowable career choice, it's hard to see how there's -- literally, mind you -- a federal case in complaints about the results of any particular bit of extispicy.

Syntactically, the most interesting thing here might be the pronouns. I count three "who" cases in the story that by prescriptive newsroom standards ought to be "whom." Has the Sun-Sentinel decided to join the Whom Is Dead crowd, or is the desk just getting careless? But the real issues are the social and cultural ones. I'd like to see these clowns in jail, but I'm wary of the old categorical imperative. If every complaint about false claims on the supernatural is a story (or a federal case), whom are we going after next?

Man eating tiger

2011-08-19T10:38:00.000-04:00

Well, that had to hurt. Let's see what the AP had to say:

The mayor of Vilnius acknowledged Tuesday distributing a deliberately altered picture to The Associated Press and other news organizations intended to dramatize his anti-parking campaign, an image that then was published in newspapers around world.

The AP withdrew the photo, transmitted on Aug. 3, and notified its customers of the breech* Monday, as soon as it discovered the deception.

And the photo dramatized his anti-parking campaign how? Was he lying in the street, eyeball to eyeball with the offending car, when it went after him? Or was he ...

Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas' office sent a photo showing him riding an armored personnel carrier, from which two other people were erased.

Oh. What Vilnius has is a car-crushing mayor, not a car crushing mayor. As old Fowler put it, there's a difference between a man eating tiger and a man-eating tiger.

Important notice: Fun with hyphens aside, Regret The Error is an invaluable part of the daily news diet. Craig is doing good work over there.

*Shurely "breach"?

Thank you, Pope Rupert

2011-08-17T23:59:00.001-04:00

Isn't it nice when a reporter goes beyond the "what" to give you the "what next"?

They're going to burn in hell.

Three godless thugs stole a churchgoing Bronx man’s Bible during a vicious beating and robbery captured on chilling surveillance video released by the NYPD yesterday.

Imagine, a newspaper that doesn't just provide coupons; it looks after your immortal soul as well! And not just yours, but souls belonging to those pesky document leakers:

It's whoever leaked the document that bears the burn-in-hell blame.

... and those annoying Democrats:

I pray the president is doing right by this country. But if he is wagging the dog, he will burn in hell.

Those are columnists, sure, but it also shows up in the occasional that's-what lede:

May he burn in hell.

That was the reaction the devastated son of a Pan Am Flight 103 victim had yesterday when he saw sickening photos of the Libyan terrorist convicted of blowing up the plane being embraced by family at home.

Before you get all technical with that redemption stuff, you should bear in mind that our Lede of the Morning for Wednesday was brought to you by the news organization that, by sometime early next year, will have its own presidential candidate. Have a good night!

Forbidden ledes: Not your typical

2011-08-17T18:31:00.001-04:00

All forms of this lede are permanently barred, under all circumstances:

The masked man who locked a fake bomb to the neck of an Australian millionaire's teenage daughter did not look like your ordinary violent criminal. The gray-haired attacker wielded a baseball bat but wore beige trousers and a light-colored dress shirt, rolled up at the elbows.

Is the AP going to enlighten us on what "your ordinary violent criminal" looks like? I'd be kind of tipped off by the baseball bat and the balaclava, I think, but maybe the gray-haired violent criminals in AP's neck of the woods don't wear light-colored dress shirts before Labor Day or something. I'm trying very hard not to think "did not look like your ordinary violent criminal" is AP-speak for "wasn't black."

AP writers shouldn't leave that impression, of course, but AP editors shouldn't pass it along, either, and AP members can certainly consider calling the control bureau to complain after they spike it themselves. But generally, that's why you avoid proclaiming that anyone is or isn't your typical single mom, college student, crazed Vietnam veteran, party activist or whatever: (a) there is no such thing, and (b) it's a good idea to keep your biases and preconceptions to yourself until you get over them.

Hard to see what makes this pedestrian feature the top news story on the frontpage, even at Lexington, but that's a different rant.

On a hill far away

2011-08-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

Say it ain't so, Old Hometown Newspaper!

"We are the cavalry," Ralls said.

Never mind.

The human eye being a willful creature, we tend to see pages in context, so "calvary" gave me a whole different first impression of the light tower in the skybox (right) -- as in, where's the other two?

Banana banana banana

2011-08-16T09:28:00.003-04:00

Do you think that maybe -- given that the kicker says "BAY OF PIGS" and all -- we could have figured out what the topic is by the time we get to "Bay of Pigs" in the main hed and the c-deck?

Display type is supposed to complement other bits of display type. One way to do this is to address a different "w" in each bit of display type: If the main hed emphasizes "what," the deck can go for "when" and the cutline for "where." The point isn't just avoiding variation; it's using the eye's natural attraction to variations in size, shape and weight to give the poor coffee-deprived reader as many reasons to enter the story as you can.

Even if you're the Miami Herald, after all, not everyone in your audience sat breathlessly by the radio in 1961 -- or grew up in an exile household. The Elongated Yellow Fruit syndrome isn't a ban on variation; it's a caution against Fowler's "elegant variation," which turns bananas into the elongated yellow fruit and sugar beets into the subterranean sweet treat. Try a when or a who to break up the incessant what-what-what.

Alert readers will also notice that the deck violates a basic rule of hed writing. Here's the lede:

Freshly released CIA documents on the Bay of Pigs invasion provide new details on the confusion, mixed messages and last-minute changes in plans that ultimately doomed the mission.

Heds come from main clauses. The core of this story is "documents provide details." The "major confusion and mixed signals" aren't news. That's why they're hanging around a relative clause after a preposition.

Dialect: The rule is 'don't'

2011-08-14T21:45:00.003-04:00

Can you guess from the hed where this one is going?

GREENLAND, N.H. -- Rick Perry, who entered the 2012 GOP race Saturday, greeted his first crowd of voters here with two words rarely heard in these parts: with a wave, he let out a boisterous “Hi, y’all” to a crowd clad in khakis and button ups gathered around a backyard pool.

Really? People in New Hampshire don't hear "hi" very much? Did we miss last week's Outlook section?

In a CNN debate in New Hampshire this summer, she introduced herself to voters by listing her professional credentials first: "Hi, my name is Michele Bachmann. I'm a former federal tax litigation attorney."

Sorry, that wasn't nice. But anyway, we seem to have a reporter who's obsessed with "y'all," and that can't end well:

There was also this: “Y’all holler outta question” to open up a question and answer* session.

No there wasn't. "Outta" stands for "out of," as in "Straight Outta Compton" or ... oh, other recent Post tales:

“I got back to class like, ‘Pfffft, I’m outta here,’ ” On says.

In "holler out a question," the "a" isn't an unstressed preposition. It's an article that goes with "question," as the Post usually seems able to recognize:

As Charles arrived at Georgetown's Healy Hall, a British reporter called out a question about what the prince would discuss with the president. (May 5, 2011)

While Conte was describing the hotel's incarnation as a soldiers' hospital during World War II, a petite woman wearing a name tag called out a question. (Jan. 10, 2010)

But when a reporter shouted out a question about whether Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) should resign after his conviction on bribery-related charges, Biden said not a word. (Oct. 29, 2008)

So two issues are in play here. The smaller (OK, and somewhat snarkier) one is that a writer who can't hear what people are doing with language shouldn't try to reproduce dialect; if the problem persists, the desk needs to step in and put a stop to it. The larger one is the sort of risk you run by singling out Rick Perry's so-called "Texas twang" as the dialect you try to reproduce.

That's partly a partisan issue. If someone accuses you of showing a bias against conservatives by making fun of their language, you don't have much of a defense. And pleading innocent on that charge -- no, we make fun of everybody who doesn't sound like us! -- actually digs you in deeper:

... There were times when the three-term Texas governor sounded eerily like the “Saturday Night Live” version of George W. Bush, droppin’ every “g” and proclaiming “awesome” at nothing in particular.

That's a whole different bundle of class, regional and cultural biases: not just that people from the South talk funny, but that norms of political speech are properly measured by particular late-night comedy shows (and that everyone in the audience can immediately conjure a mental image of SNL's Bush Jr. imitator**).

His appearance raised the question that is at the center of his candidacy: Can Perry take his Texas twang on the road and meet voters where they live, in cities and suburbs and swing states?

Leaving aside the linguistic meaninglessness of "twang" -- whoa. Does the Post really think there's no twang in any cities, suburbs or swing states where voters might live? Or has it just run out of editors who are willing to ask why a reporter's cultural fantasies belong in news coverage?

The Post's stylebook actually has some mildly useful reminders on the subject (under "quotations"):

Quotations of people whose speech is marked by dialect, incorrect grammar or profanity often present difficult choices.

Not really. If you consider "standard English" to be a dialect (which it is), everybody's speech is "marked by dialect." More "grammar" than we'd like to admit is in the eyes of the beholder. And even if you can't tell profanity from obscenity, you can paraphrase.***

In general, try to avoid condescension. Unless difficulties with the language are relevant to the story, as in an article about teaching English to immigrants or a profile of Yogi Berra, it is advisable to correct minor errors of grammar and usage. Such locutions as hafta, gonna, gotta, whaddaya and woulda should be spelled out in correct form unless they are stressed for effect.

Prone as I am to railing against the tyranny of the stylebook, and culture-bound as this entry is, it's handy to have it in writing. Yes, the writer's likely to win in an argument about "relevance to the story," but at least you have a starting point.

The Bush Jr. presidency was a disaster on many dimensions, none of which had anything to do with his dialect. Our Prestige Newspapers would do well to bear that distinction in mind. For reporters, there are two simple steps to remember:

1) Don't try to write in dialect unless you're Mark Twain
2) You aren't

Any questions?

* Yes, you should probably hyphenate "question-and-answer" as a preposed modifier. And "button-ups," while you have the hyphen gun out.
** Not that I think it's a valid point to begin with, but I can't.
*** You can prick your finger, but ...

And their music? It's just noise

2011-08-14T10:59:00.002-04:00

Never underestimate the power of journalism to comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted and belabor the obvious. Here, the Sunday Freep devotes its 2A commentary space to ... those pesky cell phones*!

Has any product ever grown so fast, changed so many things ... and caused so many problems?

Well, there's radio. (There's printing,** for that matter.) There's powered flight. There's fission, which when loaded into powered flight and dropped on other people changes a lot of things and causes a lot of problems. So these modern problems must be really, really serious:

For instance, there is nothing else we must be admonished to not use at the movies, theaters or in church.*** Without such admonitions, there is nothing that so easily distracts us from whatever we are supposed to be doing wherever we are, such as driving, watching a hockey game or going out on a dinner date. Why is whatever's coming in on the phone suddenly more important than whoever is sitting across the table?

Oh.

If you sit in meetings, classrooms or conference sessions, you know that at least every third person is devoting more attention to the phone at hand than to the subject at issue.

Get off my lawn, you kids! But there's more. Cell phones make people send pictures of their naughty bits to other people. Cell phones make you lazy and stupid because "there's an app" for crossword puzzles and driving directions.

... It seems the developing world is better for cell phones, but here in advanced society, I wonder. They are contributing to our physical, intellectual and moral decline, as well as creating hazards.

In short, all this communicating makes us worse at really communicating -- just as those pesky lines and squiggles on paper killed real storytelling, and those darn newesletters destroyed the art of coffee house conversation, and txting mrdred English kthxbai. Somewhere, Gutenberg is shaking his head in dismay, until he gets back to his Sunday column on those kids and their darn harpsichords.

* The online hed is strangely specific: "Ron Dzwonkowski: Cell phone proliferation aids developing world revolutions, causes problems in U.S."
** It took about 70 years for news of "Wineland" to reach Germany after Leif Eriksson got home. News of Columbus's voyages took about two months to reach Italy after his return to Spain.
*** This is one tangled bit of coordination, isn't it?

Elongated yellow vegetable

2011-08-07T22:03:00.000-04:00

Granted, the main hed* says "spider," so we probably don't want to repeat it if we can help it. But if we must -- it's an arachnid, not an insect.

Nor are we out of the sock drawer yet. Yes, the discovery "could" mean the spider is relocating. On the other hand, since the article acknowledges that "small groups of brown recluse** live in the state" already, maybe it doesn't.

* "Eek factor jumps as rare spider spotted in state."
** Since this isn't the outdoor section, and spiders aren't mooses, let's make it "recluses."

Time warp

2011-08-06T09:01:00.000-04:00

Where's that clue bat when you need it?

I can see how someone might have copied the homepage hed (above) from the story itself without engaging the part of brain that wonders about such things. What strikes me as odd is how the same person who wrote the deck -- "Families gather at the white church where their ancestors, once slaves, were members" -- could also have written the main hed, "Ancestors of slaves and slave masters reunite today at Bethel Presbyterian Church."