Copy editers needed

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Downhill Slope

“People ask me why there are so many mistakes in the paper. It takes me a while to explain about copy desks and what they do; about the other desks and editors; their relationship to reporters.

“As I tell them this long story, I invariably get mad. For what I am telling them is the story of the death of a newspaper I believed in, and the scuttling of the careers of talented journalists who made it great.” 

—Bill Boyarsky, columnist and retired city editor, LA Times, on the latest round of buyouts at his former newspaper, “The Once Great LA Times,” Jewish Journal, Nov. 24, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: You get what you pay for.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Coltish







 







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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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Trump’s Truth

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Pretty Good Sources 

“Last month, Trump told a South Carolina crowd that Obama was considering an executive order to take away their guns, which is not true. When asked about it the next day on CNN’s ‘New Day,’ Trump responded by saying he’d been told as much. ‘I’ve heard that he wants to and I heard and I think on your network, somebody said that that’s what he’s thinking about.’ 

“‘My source is the papers,’ Trump said. ‘They’re pretty good sources.’” 

—Michael Calderone, senior media reporter, “Donald Trump’s ‘Sources’ Are So Good, Only He Knows Who They Are,” HuffPo, November 24, 2015

• Editorial Comment: As good as the voices in your head, Don.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Last November Sunset of 2015



 







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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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Money and Books

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Point/Counterpoint

“When I get a little money I buy books,” said Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), philosopher, humanist and theologian. “And if any is left I buy food and clothes.”

Sometime later, American writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) observed, “I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but it that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”

• Editorial Comment: To buy books for the dog, right, Dottie?

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Equal time: A cat



 





Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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
.

Thanks

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Dear Turkeys: The WORD is so distressed by recent world events that he’s taking a few days off. The excuse is good old American gluttony and overindulgence. But the real plan does not include an enormous feast: He’ll hang with the dogs and his sweet baboo, stare at his navel, and look for balance. And he’ll be damn grateful for the chance. Good thoughts, all. —TP 
 
Thanksgiving Traditions

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”

—Jon Stewart, murderous, unemployed land-grabber

• Editorial Comment: But what’s for dinner?




PeezPix by Ted Pease

Fixer-Upper


 





Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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
.

Open Minds

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Suppress That Thought! 

“Hostility to the exercise of free speech on American college campuses is nothing new. But what happened at Yale University, the University of Missouri and other colleges over the past two weeks is something new and frightening. The suppression of speech in academia has begun to spiral out of control.”

—Nat Hentoff, columnist and author, “Suppression of Free Speech in Academia Is Out of Control,” Cato.org, Nov. 18, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Protest is nothing new, strange or bad at college. But screaming down and shaming people who disagree, that's not how to learn about new ideas.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

On the Waterfront


 





Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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
.

Storyteller

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Pass It Along

“Do stories grow? Pretty obviously — anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously — they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes…

“Stories grow, sometimes they shrink. And they reproduce — they inspire other stories. And, of course, if they do not change, stories die.”

—Neil Gaiman, English science fiction author, “Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last,” Brainpickings, June 2015

• Editorial Comment: That’s a pretty good definition of how journalism works.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Seascape




Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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
.

Hate Mail

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Just Shoot Him

“I get a lot of hate mail, but it’s predictable. They claim I’m sort of taking advantage of free speech, that I ought to go to Russia, where I’d be shot, and that if America was any good, I’d be shot here, too.” 

—Tony Auth (1942-2014), Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, 1977, quoted in his Washington Post obit, 2014

• Editorial Comment: If he’d lived a little longer, Auth could have been shot right here in America, the way things are going.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Keyboard








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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
.

No News Is . . .

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. . . Well, No News 

“These trends have left many people wondering who will collect hard news for the general public. While the Internet world has made it possible for everyone to express their opinion widely — whether they know anything or not — it has also confused readers. In the absence of supposedly neutral intermediaries such as reporters, fact-checkers and editors, readers are having a hard time judging the credibility of what they read.” 

—Elaine C. Kamarck and Ashley Gabriele, researchers, “The news today: 7 trends in old and new media,” The Brookings Institution, November 2015

• Editorial Comment: “Credibility”?

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Apples!
















Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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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Dear Professor . . .

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Your Life’s Work Sucks

“Harvard’s Steven Pinker . . . authored an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education in which he used adjectives like ‘turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand’ to describe academic writing. In an email, Pinker told me that the reaction to his article ‘has been completely positive.’” 

—Victoria Clayton, writer, “The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing: A new movement strivesfor simplicity,” The Atlantic, October 26, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: Reviewer #2, however, dismissed Pinker’s argument as “sophomoric, pedestrian, oompa-loompish and unsupported by his own null hypothesis.” Be like that.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Art Alley















Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 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
.