CJR’s Campaign Desk, on the facts of President Bush’s National Guard service: Here’s the real story. In May of 1972, Bush moved from Texas to Alabama to work as campaign manager for Republican Winton “Red” Blount’s senate campaign. He requested…
Category: Editing commentary
Why they call them Testy
Somebody over at Testy Copy Editors asked what people thought of capitalizing “spring break.” My favorite response: Bu-Gal is being asked to treat spring break as if it’s fuckin’ Ramadan. I empower her to hurl a dictionary in protest. Blanp…
Smart vs. dumb competition
A reporter writes to Jay Rosen complaining about the pressures of of the campaign trail. Reporter thinks he doesn’t want to focus on the horse-race and does want to focus on what voters are talking about, what goes into their…
Oops
From Sridhar Pappu’s latest column. While perhaps a reasoned, well-thought basis for a beat, The Times assigning a reporter to cover conservatives still feels strange, if not off-putting?a little like Judd Nelson peering through the bathroom window at Phoebe Cates…
Where were the copy editors?
Jack Shafer of Slate eviscerates the New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story on sex slaves in America. (More at the Radosh Blog). Without rehashing everything, suffice to say that every question Shafer and Radosh pose sound exactly like the…
Earth to Mr. Clifton:
Nobody’s buying that “trust us, we’re unbiased” line anymore. For more on this, see everything Jay Rosen has written in the past few months.
Cowardice, illustrated
Columbia Journalism Review has a piece about a relatively obscure topic — illustrations for the op-ed page — that ends up a blistering critique of an industry scared shitless of its own readers and hostile to creativity. Read the whole…
Memorize this
From a Washington Post story last month about the guy who took on Apple when his Ipod’s battery died: Like a doctor with zero bedside manner, Ryan pretty quickly gets to the point: Since Neistat’s iPod is past the year-long…
‘Rock is dead they say’
Or, well, rock criticism is. I’d suggest the real problem isn’t our obsession with celebrities, it’s our obsession with the notion that things were better in the good old days.
Let’s dump ‘Jury’s Still Out’ stories
Here we have Newsday reporting that it’s too soon to tell whether tabs targeting young readers are gaining any traction. See, if I were ambitious enough to work up a functioning lampoon of this kind of story, I’d post a…