Poynter articles

[bulliciosa]

Every now and then, I remember to check-in on Poynter. Here are a few articles I found interesting.

- Scripps Howard Finds Many 'Closed' Murder Cases Were Never Solved: "When the Scripps investigators published their findings, including an interactive chart that lets the reader drill down to the county level, it became clear that some police

Comments

[terry_terrible]

- Preserving Language Standards as You Cover a Raunchy Culture: "Journalists, take notice: We will be seeing more of the C-word and will face interesting and controversial decisions about what to do when it appears

Not only that, but the traditional role of the journalist as some kind cultural standard-bearer or gatekeeper of grammer or language has been destroyed by the proliferation of internet media and the easy access to create and distribute your own media. I was reminded of this when the NYT decided last week to not use the word "twitter" as verb, which is technically correct decision since there are better and more directly understandable ways to communicate the same idea.

But at the same time it ignores the every day use of the word and that even though it may not be in the OED, people are using it that way anyway and the NYT is futher distancing itself from its own potential audience by doing this.

What words the NYT decides to use might have mattered 15 or 20 years ago but it has certainly lost it's weight almost to the point that few people over the age of thirty gives a shit what words the NYT decides to use unless they are specifically interested in language (as a lover of language, writer or journalist).

And I don't see this as an inherently bad thing, the people to regulate culture/grammer as newspapers once did should never be as concentrated as was just ten or fifteen years ago. So this is a good thing even thought the (imagined) prestige of the journalist might fall with this trend.