Thursday, May 27, 2010

Reinventing the newspaper

3 comments:

Jim Grey said...

Think of all the ink that will be saved!

DANIELBLOOM said...

Hi Bill,
dan Bloom in Taiwan, former C E at Daily Yomiuri in Japan and Taipei Times in Taiwan, student of yours and Philip Blanchard, who has banned me for life from Testy for coming up with the Crash Blossoms coinage.....via Nessie3 of course.... and of course, my old mentor Bill Safire, RIP, i was a regular on Sundays long ago, Tufts 1971 moi....and I know you Bill from the Post, i used to be cartoonst there in 1970s...Bradlee almost hired me to be an obit writer....interview in his office

i was hoping you'd drop by here, this was my fishing expedition to get some feedback pro and con. I know you don't agree but you will one day. As for copy editors, my bad, you are right, i was typing in haste, and i always get confused.....two words, you are right....but what are you objections to lowercase on internet...?

this just in from UK website, Bill,
take a look:

http://www.techeye.net/internet/ne

The New York Times sure doesn't like to lead THE way, especially with language in technology. As many forward THINKING and established news organs over here in Blighty agree, THERE'S no need to capitalise the 'i' in internet. However THE New York Times, as well as Associated Press, have STUBBORNLY refused to make the switch to lower case.

"Our CURRENT style is to keep the uppercase "I" [for Internet]," CORBETT told a friend. "I agree that the trend is TOWARD lowercase, and I suspect that at some point we WILL review our style. But our preference is to follow ESTABLISHED usage, not to lead the way. So I can't PREDICT when the change might be made."

The same friend INFORMED us that Ted Anthony, an editor at Associated Press, WOULD be for a change but it's such a big DEAL that we'd expect to see a press release issued FIRST.

Which is all fine - freedom of the press (to QUIBBLE over grammar) and all that. We must say, however, THE New York Times seems to be pretty keen to USE the Apple-approved syntax for iPad. Shouldn't that be IPAD, or Ipad, or ipad?

Mack Lundstrom said...

Clueless here, but I know no other way to ask you a direct question. If a new newspaper decided to pattern its up-style headlines after the rules in AP's composition titles, how would you rule on this head? Obama Urged To Stand Up to GOP Critics — two issues — caplitalize "Up" because it's part of the verb; capitalize the first "To" because it's part of a principal word/s in the sentence?

I'm Mack Lundstrom, mlundstrom@casa.sjsu.edu, adviser to Spartan Daily at SJSU; sloSwede at Twitter.