Hey! There’s a science to it!

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Overheard in the Newsroom #1713:

New Media editor: “Teaching journalism? That’s like… teaching coal mining.”
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Abrasives

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Fine Editorial Sanding

“[T]here is a terrific disadvantage not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily, to an administration, even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press. . . It seems to me their obligation is to be as tough as they can on the administration but do it in a way which is directed towards getting as close to the truth as they can get and not merely because of some political motivation.”

—John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th U.S. president, 1962

• This week from Uncle Jay Explains the News.
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Workplace etiquette . . .

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. . . . take a breath before resorting to strangulation.

Overheard in the Newsroom #1695:

Photo editor #1: “Why are you staring at me?”

Photo editor #2: “Because I can’t strangle you.”

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Verbish Doggerel

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On Verbiage & Punditry

Editor’s Note: In Monday’s season opener, my students were challenged to find definitions of “verbiage” and “punditry,” two terms with which the WORD is overly familiar. A loyal WORDster sends this original illustration in the style of the Mighty Ogden Nash . . .

“The definition of punditry
is a scholarly gift to all and sunditry
The definition of verbiage
is just so much excess wordy baggiage.”
—Javan Kienzle, alert WORDster, author and editor, 2009

Another Note: Yesterday’s query from a WORDster in Vietnam yielded a number of pointers. To see them, or to pitch in, go yesterday’s WORDlink and click on the comments link at the bottom of the day’s quote:

• This from a faithful WORDster, seeking assistance with a Quindlen quote. I have my own ideas, but would be interested if the rest of the Faithful would like to take a whack at it. Reply to me, or post directly to the comments section of yesterday’s Word.

Hi there, I have to do a translation assignment but cannot understand this quote? Could you please help to clarify it? “Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.” --Anna Quindlen Thank you for your help and thanks for continuing to send the interesting and useful journalism opinions everyday. Regards, Thu

Precious Pest

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Liberty’s Pesty Shadow

“We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is, however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper’s ally. It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.”

—Fisher Ames (1758-1808), Massashusetts statesman, 1807
(Thanks to alert WORDster Joseph Benham)

Query
This from a faithful WORDster, seeking assistance with a Quindlen quote. I have my own ideas, but would be interested if the rest of the Faithful would like to take a whack at it. Reply to me, or post directly to the “comments” at the end of this post.

Hi there,
I have to do a translation assignment but cannot understand this quote? Could you please help to clarify it?
“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.” – Anna Quindlen
Thank you for your help and thanks for continuing to send the interesting and useful journalism opinions everyday.
Regards,
Thu

PS
This from a Facebook Post yesterday:
Overheard in the Newsroom #1686: Home-school kid on tour of newsroom to copy editors/paginators: “So basically... your job is a bunch of clicking.”
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You Want Fries With That?

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The Good Old Days of Newspapering
“On behalf of the newspaper industry (new, cost-cutting motto: ‘All the News That’), I wish to announce some changes we’re making to serve you better. When I say ‘serve you better,’ I mean ‘increase our profits.’ We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We’re a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.”
—Dave Barry, columnist, The Miami Herald, 2001


Ted Kennedy Dead at 77
—The Boston Globe

“Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed.”
—U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. (1932-2009)






RIP, Teddy.

Ignorance ≠ Bliss?

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A thought as school starts. . .

“If you are not in awe of what you don’t know, you shouldn’t be a journalist.”

—Sandy Close, executive editor and director, New America Media, 1995

(Thanks to alert WORDster Betty Medsger)

And that’s the WORD.

Additional wisdom from Uncle Jay Explains the News.
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SEASON 14! The WORD Is Baaaaa-aaaack!

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Riled by ‘Stephen-Come-Lately Colbert,’ The WORD
Escapes Sanitarium for Season 14 of Pithy Wisdom

LOGAN, Utah—Sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, as students flood back onto campuses, as professors steel themselves for another academic year—well, perhaps more like the buzzards that flock back to Hinckley, Ohio every year—Today’s WORD on Journalism broke out of its padded maximum conjugation cubicle sometime in the pre-dawn Monday.

Doctors and overly thesarused white-coated attendants at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose on a rocky crag overlooking the Pacific in Northern California confirmed at 6 a.m. (MDT) today that the WORD is once more free to afflict a news-addled planet with more pithy “wisdom” on journalism, the mass media, and a nearly extinct superannuated institution, the press.

The first panicky whispers came shortly after 2 a.m. as the dreamless sleep of the blissfully ignorant was rent by the first murky soundbites of quotable insight.

Contacted in his crypt, former President Thomas Jefferson rescinded his famous edict—“No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will,” saying, “I take it back. If the WORD is this generation’s version of truth and wisdom, then we’re better off with Lost.”

Reportedly, one of the things that really ticked off the WORD has been the misappropriation of its moniker not only by organized religion, but apparently especially, by Comedy Central pundit and interloper Stephen Colbert, whose feature “The Word” increasingly impinges on this WORD’s territory.

Over recent weeks, snoozing uneasily beneath stacks of Bartlett’s, Brainy Quotes and Marvel comics, St. Mumbles officials reported, the WORD has been thrashing in his uneasy sleep, muttering, “Truthiness!” and other obscure epithets. Taking a page, literally, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prescription, “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,” the WORD seems to have escaped St. Mumbles by boat.

“There is some slim hope that he fell overboard and drowned,” one officer at the scene said.

As the mingled joy and horror spread, the news that the WORD had once again shimmied down the drainpipe at St. Mumbles to launch its 14th horrific season of punditry and verbiage prompted the most violent response in the journalism department at Utah State University, which spawned the global online affliction in 1995.

(NOTE: If you are one of Professor Pease’s students—and if you are, everyone pities you—your assignment is to define both “punditry” and “verbiage,” and use each in a sentence that makes their meaning clear. Note: Wikipedia is NOT an accepted source! “Truthiness,” too, for that matter.)

Back-story: The WORD was originally concocted (“conceived” is, I think, altogether too grand) as a way to get journalism students to pay attention to their email. Strange as it may sound, email was in 1995 a new and unpleasant disturbance of the general peace, and many students did not then spend 16 hours a day online. As a professor hoping to get and keep their attention while also instructing them, my object was that the WORD would give them something to think about before class. Hope, like the WORD, springs eternal.

I think it’s fair to say that this strategy was a dismal failure. Most of my students continue to ignore their daily WORDs and gaily accept point reductions on their quizzes for not knowing the day's wordish wisdom from philosophers ranging from Soren Kierkegaard to Brian Williams to Lisa Simpson.

But the WORD has become rather frighteningly popular with non-students, purported grown-ups, mostly, who actually ask to be afflicted or who send email addresses of unsuspecting friends/colleagues/parents/bosses, so that they might be victimized as well.

When the WORD was trundled by those nice white-jacketed men into St. Mumbles Sanitarium last spring, nearly 1,800 (mostly volunteer) victims subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the website, whence it was forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting victims by so-called “friends.”

As usual, we launch this season with the ever-useful wisdom of the genial former colonial Royal High Pontentate of the Virginia Colony, whose high regard for both education and the press still rings with an increasingly popular fervor today. Enjoy!

TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The Season Opener

“I thank God we have no free schools or printing, and I hope that we shall not have these for a hundred years. For learning has brought disobediences and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both.”

—Sir William Berkeley
Governor, Virginia Colony, 1671

And that’s the WORD.

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