You Are What You Read

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Style

“[O]pening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy—a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.”

—Garrison Keillor, writer, poet, radio host and stylish newspaper reader, 2007

• Editorial Comment: And then you can slide it under a puppy, or set it on fire.




PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Crazy Dog








TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Risky Business

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Not Today

“Most journalists who regularly risk their lives to do their jobs are not foolhardy. They don’t want to die. They might say that no story is worth their lives. But they might add that you’re asking the wrong question. Because they’re not going to die today. War journalists can usually find reasons to predict why they will survive ahead of their more impulsive colleagues.” 

—Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor, in John Plunkett, “Jeremy Bowen: Even daring reporters may deem Isis threat too risky,” The Guardian, Nov. 4, 2014 Image: ISIS hostage journalist Kenji Goto

• Editorial Comment: No story is worth their lives.

• Related: “Kenji Goto: Abe condemns ‘despicable’ IS hostage video,” BBC 

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Sunrise Beach






TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Please Leave a Message

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Self-Absorption

“All social etiquette regarding the use of phones in company seems to have disappeared. The device takes precedence over the person that is present, and that felt wrong. It is a form of rejection and lowers the self-worth of the person superseded for a device. I feel it also highlights a growing sense of self-absorption in people as they would rather focus on their world in their phone, rather than speak to the person they are with.” 

—Babycakes Romero, British photographer, on his new photo series, “The Death of Conversation,” documenting obsessed smart phone users, “What your smartphone addiction actually looks like,” The Washington Post, October 2014. Image: Babycakes Romero

• Editorial Comment: Um, sorry. I’ve got to take this.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

St. George Reef Lighthouse, Crescent City, California












TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Uncivil

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News Note: Tired of “uncivil dialogue” and hateful rants, the Las Vegas Review-Journal stops taking anonymous reader comments on its stories.
 
Oh, Shut Up!

“Commenting is a privilege that is too often abused, and turning off comment boards in no way violates readers’ First Amendment protection. 

“The First Amendment protects us from, among other things, laws that abridge our freedom of speech. Nowhere does it require the media to provide you a platform for that speech, whether hateful or not.”

—The Editors, “Why we turned off our comment boards today,” The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 23, 2015 Image: Louis Leopold Boilly, 1818

• Editorial Comment: No comment. You mouth-breathing moron.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Beach Romp






TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Mayhem, misery, madness & grammar

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For my copy editing students

“We owe much to our mother tongue. It is through speech and writing that we understand each other and can attend to our needs and differences. If we don't respect and honor the rules of English, we lose our ability to communicate clearly and well. In short, we invite mayhem, misery, madness, and inevitably even more bad things that start with letters other than M.”

—National Grammar Day, 1980 Image: from J. Martyn Walsh and Anna Kathleen Walsh, Plain English Handbook, Wichita, Kansas, 1946

• Editorial Comment: There’s nausea, and nightmares, and nosebleeds. And let’s not even start on the O.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Redwood Stump











TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Most Trusted

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Critical Thinker

“Online search engines have overtaken traditional media as the most trusted source for general news and information, according to a global survey of 27,000 people by Edelman, a public relations firm. . . . 

“[T]he striking thing is that Google does not actually report on anything, but instead serves up links to stories on a mix of other sites that users, apparently, trust less than the aggregator itself.”

—John McDuling, writer, “Google is now a more trusted source of news than the websites it aggregates,” Quartz.com, Jan. 20, 2015

• Editorial Comment: I saw this in the Times, but didn’t believe it until I saw it on HuffPo.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Totems







 
TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Lovable decrepit alcoholics

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Staff Issues 

“We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. 
“The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute ‘commitment’ for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.”

—Conrad Black, F. David Radler and Peter G. White, “A Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media from the Sherbrooke Record, the voice of the Eastern Townships,” 1969

• Editorial Comment: And let’s not even talk about those imps over at the TV station, and their chainsaw antics.

• Note: Black, Radler and White knew their scoundrels. See Globe and Mail, “The lonely battle of Peter White,” 2010.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Diesel Door







 




TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Journalist Security

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No Surrender 

“We all know that journalism can be dangerous. There’s no way to eliminate the risk completely, except by keeping silent, and that’s what we call surrender. So that’s not in the cards.”

—John Kerry, U.S. secretary of state, at State Department’s Journalist Security Conference, Jan. 20, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Diplomatic talk is so fancy.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Trinidad Town Hall



 




TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Spiked

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News Note: Gannett kills copy desks

“It is not just the loss of copy editors’ attention to niceties of spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style that made the published prose look reasonably polished and professional. It is the loss of people whose specific task was to raise awkward questions. Is this clear? Is this right? Is this plagiarized? Is this libelous? Is this a story? Is this true?”

—John E. McIntyre, columnist, on word that the Cincinnati Enquirer and other newspapers are eliminating copy editors, “And then there were none,” The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 23, 2014  

• Editorial Comment: Hello, Sun copy desk, shouldn’t that be, “And then there was none. . . .”?

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Short Skiff Stack



 




TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

MLK’s 86th Birthday

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Still Dreaming

“For some, the fact that we have Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a confirmation that the war has been won, that racism has been eliminated. That we have overcome. But we have to look at the civil rights movement like antibiotics: Just because some of the symptoms of racism are clearing up, you don’t stop taking the medicine or the malady returns even stronger than before.”
 

—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, basketball champ, author and educator on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, “Why I Have Mixed Feelings About MLK Day,” Time, Jan. 18, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Forty-seven years after King’s assassination, bigots and boneheads still aren’t good about taking their medicine.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Redwoods



 




TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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GIGO

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Fact-checking

“We don’t have to search far for reasons why citizens are losing touch with reality. Our information system has been corrupted by talk show hosts who tell tall tales, politicians who concoct self-serving half truths, journalists who orchestrate phony debates, public relations specialists who spin nearly everything imaginable. Sadly, some of them have been at it so for so long that even they can no longer tell fact from fiction.”

 

—Thomas E. Patterson, professor of government and the press, Harvard, “A scarce commodity: Trustworthy and relevant information,” October 2014 

• Editorial Comment: Garbage in, garbage out. Video @ 11.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Sundown



 








TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Presidential Endorsement

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Even-Handed

“I know CNN has taken some knocks lately, but the fact is I admire their commitment to cover all sides of a story, just in case one of them happens to be accurate.”  

—President Barack Obama at the 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner

• Editorial Comment: Always a 50-50 chance.

PeezPix by Ted Pease 
 

Wispy Morning



 








TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM is a free “service” sent to the 1,800 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.