Category: Editing commentary

Alert the Food Desk

Food is not safe as long as you pick it up within five seconds of its hitting the floor. From snopes.com: Drop a cookie onto a clean floor, and you could eat it with impunity. Drop it onto a contaminated…

Craig on the Raiders’ comeback win

The Oakland Raiders staged a stunning comeback yesterday, scoring two touchdowns in the final six minutes and winning in overtime. Here’s Craig Lancaster’s story. And now, for the excerpts: With 5:59 left in the fourth quarter Sunday, the Raiders were…

Edna on editors

From the Calvin Trillin profile of Edna Buchanan (linked via Romenesko and newsdesigner yesterday) comes this bit about editors: There are editors who want to cut a story even though it was virtually ordained to run at least sixteen inches.…

Craig’s in the press box tonight

… with Al Michaels and John Madden. (There’s nothing about Michaels or Madden at that link … it’s to Craig’s advance on tonight’s Raiders-Broncos game on ABC; I just put their names up there because it seems like the best…

Fishing for a good quote

If you hang around long enough, one of those jocks will say something that is not a cliche. From Craig Lancaster’s second-day story on Raiders’ weak victory against the worst NFL team of 2002: Guard Frank Middleton, sitting at his…

Bridge too far

Why are we still running bridge columns that nobody has a clue how to edit? The Testy Copy Editors don’t know for sure either. While you’re over there, enter the Jump Head Competition.

Lessons of complacency

The subject of this rant is me. That is, something insufferably stupid that I did, compounded because there were safety mechanisms built in to avoid such a thing but for about 30 seconds I was lazy, smug and sloppy enough…