Misspellings costing folks big bucks on eBay
From the New York Times: One unofficial survey of eBay offerings — an hour's search for creative spellings — turned up dozens of items, including bycicles, telefones, dimonds, mother of perl, cuttlery, bedroom suits and loads of antiks.

Catch those misspellings. The sellers don't get many bidders because you search by key word. If the seller doesn't spell the item correctly, the item doesn't turn up in the search findings. Now there are people who purposely look for the misspellings, buy the merchandise low, then sell high with correctly spelled titles and descriptions.

Key quote: "Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he cleaned up and put back on the auction block with the right spelling. They sold for $200. "I've bought and sold stuff on eBay and Yahoo that I bought for next to nothing" because of poor spelling or vague descriptions, he said."

It pays to spell!

Make a living blogging
Also from Online Journalism Review: Joshua Micah Marshall's plea for funds to cover the formal debut of the 2004 presidential election got him so much money he ended up giving a lot of it back. But such a display of respect and loyalty for his Talking Points Memo -- which gets 300,000 unique visitors a month -- shows that blogging may yet become a viable way for journalists to earn a living.

From the story: Marshall had no idea what to expect when he posted an item on his blog the afternoon of Oct. 26 soliciting contributions to send him to New Hampshire for the final 10 days of the Granite State's presidential primary. Marshall, who writes the Talking Points Memo, hoped that a few dollars might trickle in while he prepared to take the next step: drafting a budget for the trip and posting a fund-raising "thermometer" tracking progress toward his goal.
*********************************************

New media v. Old media: Who should get press credentials?
The U.S. House and Senate have rules governing which print and broadcast reporters can have press passes -- but they have not yet developed guidelines for online publications. Attempts to apply outdated credentialing rules to online journalists have left some reporters out in the cold.

From Online Journalism Review: According to the rules set by the Standing Committee of Correspondents, a journalist applying for a credential must demonstrate that "his or her principal income is obtained from news correspondence intended for publication in newspapers entitled to second-class mailing privileges."
*********************************************************

Youth switching to cable, Internet for election coverage

From TelevisionWeek: A recent study on campaign news consumption sheds some light on where young men and women get their news.

Its conclusion: Cable is the leading source, and late-night talk shows and the Internet are also among the best ways to serve news to a young audience.

"Young people, by far the hardest-to-reach segment of the political news audience, are abandoning mainstream sources of election news and increasingly citing alternative outlets, including comedy shows such as the 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart' and 'Saturday Night Live,' as their source for election news," according to the Pew Research Center report, released Jan. 11.

Also from the TelevisionWeek report: Only 23 percent of Americans 18 to 29 watch nightly network news for campaign information, down from 39 percent in 2000. About 23 percent read daily papers, while 37 percent watch cable news networks. Comedy shows were cited as a source for 21 percent and the Internet for 20 percent.

The number of young people who learn about the campaign from local TV news is down from 42 percent in 2000 to 29 percent.
***********************************************************

Giving Rome News-Tribune a run for its money: new news source

From the former editor of the Rome newspaper comes www.hometownheadlines.com , a new venture that has a nice, clean design and, surprising for such a small startup, a lot of news. The site features “The Buzz of Northwest Georgia,” which is a news briefs column, and a weekly op-ed piece from "Druck."

BBC's Chairman Quits After Hutton Report

As if to illustrate the strangeness of the position it found itself in, reporting on the news even as it became the news itself, it was the BBC that broke the story of the resignation of its chairman, Gavyn Davies, late Wednesday afternoon.

From the New York Times: The news came as a surprise to the broadcaster's competitors, to the general public and to the employees of the BBC, which had earlier issued a statement saying that no decisions would be announced right away. But Mr. Davies's resignation, and the way it was covered by his own organization as a seismic development following the release of Lord Hutton's report into the events leading to the suicide of a government weapons expert David Kelly last summer, reflect the central place of the BBC in the political and cultural life of Britain.

Check out what the BBC is saying about the resignation.
***************************************************

New York Times launches 1st blog
The New York Times launched its first Weblog. "Times on the Trail" is a new "continuously updated report from the campaign trail reported and edited by the Washington bureau of The Times and produced by NYTimes.com."

"On the Trail" includes an excellent collection of well-organzed links in the right column, including "a selective guide to today's campaign coverage on the Web" -- the first time we've seen The Times link so extensively to competitors' sites.

As Cyberjournalist.net points out, the Times' has been weighing using Weblogs for some time now, so this is not really a surprise. Regular readers of CyberJournalist.net know The Times has already been experimenting with the format in "Kristoff Responds," a Webloggish forum in which Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed columnist for The Times, answers reader e-mail and gives "the story behind the column."

Online newspaper put out by teens

A high school junior in Roslyn, N.Y., cited inspiration from Sept. 11 in starting a Web site that and interactive news magazine. Called Newsbyteens.com, the site takes submissions and has about five teens creating content.
**********************************************

Corrections up at the AJ-C

In 2003, the AJ-C printed a record 781 corrections, up from 694, also a record, in 2002. Why? Were there more mistakes? Not likely. It probably has to do with the newspaper being more aggressive in finding and correcting the mistakes they make. As public editor Mike King wrote, recognizing and correcting mistakes is the first step toward preventing them. For comparison, the Portland Oregonian had 804 corrections, Chicago Tribune 732 corrections. Remember, calendars and datebooks contain many of these mistakes.

citation: 24 January 2004 AJ-C, Inside the AJC column by Mike King
*****************************************************

New magazines just out

Magazines continue to multiply, targeting niches or special interests. According to the AJ-C, new ones include Reality Check, a magazine on reality TV from the publishers of Soap Opera Digest.

Also new is a magazine for NASCAR's 75 million fans: American Thunder, published in San Francisco by Kable News.

State of the Union samplings
From the AJC and the Washington Post, compare to what you wrote Friday.

Here is the lede from the AJC:
In an election-year appeal, President Bush asserted in Tuesday's State of the Union address that the United States has grown safer, stronger and more prosperous under his leadership.

Making his case for a second term, Bush urged the nation to stay the course in Iraq and continue the broad anti-terrorism campaign and efforts to shift economic power from the government to individuals.

"We have not come all this way --- through tragedy and trial and war --- only to falter and leave our work unfinished," Bush told an audience that included a joint session of Congress, most of his Cabinet and an estimated 60 million TV viewers.

From the Washington Post:
President Bush last night devoted the final State of the Union address of his term to a vigorous and sometimes combative defense of his actions as president, calling the United States a "nation with a mission" that has made the right decisions to invade Iraq, cut taxes, and reshape its education and health care laws.

In a speech that previewed the major themes the president would use on the campaign trail as he seeks reelection in November, Bush eschewed the list of new legislative initiatives commonly offered in State of the Union addresses. Instead, he cited objections that Democratic critics have had to his policies on Iraq, taxes, education and health care -- and offered pointed rebuttals.

"We have faced serious challenges together -- and now we face a choice," the president said in the House chamber. "We can go forward with confidence and resolve -- or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us. We can press on with economic growth, and reforms in education and Medicare -- or we can turn back to the old policies and old divisions."

German newspapers in the hurt locker

While Germany's economy rumbles back to life, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the country's other newspapers have enjoyed little of the recovery. With ad revenue down nearly 40 percent since its peak in 2000, and once-lucrative help-wanted ads off by 75 percent, the leading publishers are being forced to confront fundamental questions about the viability of their business.

Nowhere has the pain been more acute than at Germany's two most celebrated dailies, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Both expanded pell-mell during the Internet boom. At the Süddeutsche, the reversal in ad sales was so severe that it brought the paper to the brink of bankruptcy in October 2002.
Whole story
*********************************************

USA Today reporter resigns after doubts about his reporting

It was only after the resignation of Jayson Blair, who was found last May to have fabricated or plagiarized parts of at least three dozen articles in The New York Times, that Jack Kelley's editors responded to an anonymous internal complaint about his work by asking a former deputy managing editor to investigate some of his articles.

Pressed, in a new climate of stricter journalistic accountability, to verify the reporting for a 1999 article that had long raised doubts among some colleagues - Mr. Kelley had written of a "Yugoslav army, three-ring notebook'' that contained "a direct order to a lieutenant to 'cleanse' '' a village' - he made what the newspaper says was a fatal mistake: Mr. Kelley permitted a woman who had not been involved in the reporting to pass herself off as its translator. After being confronted with the deception, he resigned under pressure on Jan. 6, the newspaper said.
Whole story

Speaking of good writing books . . .
Check out "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music," by John McWhorter. The author says there are a lot of causes for the language's decline, including:
*vast wasteland of television (I agree: The Apprentice? The L Word? ugh)
*counterculture and its unrelenting deconstruction of language
*sloppiness of email, IM and online communication
*the decline of written communication in general (in favor of spoken)

McWhorter makes an interesting and I think valid argument. As recently as WWII, our spoken language aspired to the quality of written communication. Shakespeare is a great example: written dialogue spoken. Wherefore art thou Romeo. Today, writing has been yanked down to the level of talk. We write more as we converse, which is to say very casually.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed the book in its 6 November 2003 issue.
*************************************************************

Punctuation book a bestseller in England
The book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" has been a surprise bestseller in England. By Lynne Truss, it's about punctuation and writing. Truss told the NY Times, which called it "an intellectual stocking-stuffer," her friends thought it would be "commercial suicide."

Why has it been so successful?
*It's brief (a spritely volume)
*refers to the apostrophe as "our long-suffering little friend"
*argues for the semicolon's usefulness
*damns the hyphen
*it has a cheerful yellow cover
*Truss doesn't yell at her readers; she whispers

I think it's sold because of the intriguing and inviting title, which refers to a joke: "A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked, Panda. The bartender reads the entry and finds: "Panda. Large, black-and-white, bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

That's all it takes . . . one misplaced comma.
******************************************************************

Internet used increasingly to get news
The popularity of the Internet as source of news and information continues to rise as more and more Americans want their information faster, according to a recent poll reported by a newspaper in Texas.

The Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the Internet boasts as many visitors to political and news websites as people who watch public television, Sunday morning news programs, and weekly news magazines.

Something else: Interestingly, the poll found that adults under 30 get their news from late-night comedy shows, such as NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." Less than one in four (23 percent) say they get their news about the political races from the nightly network news, down significantly from the 39 percent just four years ago.
******************************************************************

Salon.com gets a boost
The founder of Rolling Stone magazine and the co-chair of Adobe Systems (makers of Photoshop, among other software) are investing another $800,000 in Salon.com to keep the Web company afloat. Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone founder and editor, will write some coverage of the presidential election for Salon.

"I really like what they have been doing over the years," Wenner told the NY Times. "I have been impressed with their journalistic drive and energy."

Companion piece to the one in the post below

This story goes neatly with the one by Scanlon described in the post immediately below: “Persuasive Writers Contribute Their Revision Strategies”, also from the Poynter Instutite.

What's your favorite or best revision strategy?
**********************************************************************

More on the writing process

Check out a short article, “Rejecting Our First Draft Culture: Strategies for Revision,”> by Chris Scanlon at the Poynter Online site. One of Scanlon’s major points is that writers never allow themselves the necessary time to revise, that they’re always reporting/researching and never drafting (which is the necessary part of writing for him). His major strategy: “put it away,” which isn’t always easy.
**********************************************************************

Great quote on the writing and editing process

“The writing process is essentially transactional. At some moment, the writer has got to let her work go into the hands of at least one other in order for it to become ‘written’ at all. And that other may . . . oh, God alone knows what that other may do, but it hardly bears contemplating. If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven’t even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.” CITATION: (Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: on becoming a [woman] writer, 1994, p. 138)
**********************************************************************

Blog gets Atlanta couple behind Howard Dean
ill Travers of Atlanta had never worked for a political candidate in his life. Until Howard Dean and the Internet came along.

Now Travers and his wife, Suzanne, are packing up and heading for snowy Iowa to campaign for Dean in the crucial Iowa caucuses Monday, part of an army of some 3,500 Dean volunteers braving the frigid weather in hopes of helping the former Vermont governor win the opening battle of the 2004 presidential campaign.

"I would never have gotten this involved if not for the Internet," said Travers, 60, who spent hours reading blogs -- Web logs -- posted by other Dean supporters before deciding to attend a real-life meeting of Dean supporters in Atlanta last fall. "I think it's the wave of the future for political campaigns, especially the way the Dean people put it together. They made it so easy."

Story at AJC.com
*************************************************************************

Where did commas come from?
In the eighth century an English monk named Alcuin, backed by an edict from the emperor Charlemagne, established the laws of grammar for scribes across the Roman Empire.

"Let them distinguish the proper sense by colons and commas," he wrote, "and let them see the points each one in its due place, and let not him who reads the words to them either read falsely or pause suddenly."

Alcuin's laws have survived for more than 12 centuries.
**********************************************************************

Welcome!
This space represents a daily blog for Dr. Brian Carroll's print journalism classes at Berry College.

Participation in this space will be encouraged and rewarded to the same degree as in-class participation, so if you're not the most outgoing of undergraduate gestalt, give a shout out here. You'll get instructions on how to post to this space in class. Have no fear. It's way easy and can be done from anywhere.

What's a blog?
**********************************************************************

Word of the Year
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- A U.S. Web site specializing in language named what it called the top word: "Embedded," as in the reporters assigned to accompany military units during the war. It beat out "blog" and "SARS" as the top word of 2003, Web site yourDictionary.com said.

Previous top words include 2000's "chad" (from the hanging squares of paper on Florida presidential ballots), 2001's "Ground Zero" (the site where the World Trade Center collapsed) and 2002's "misunderestimate" (a presidential slip of the tongue that became frequent comedy fodder).

Shock-and-awe," the phrase the U.S. military used to describe the type of campaign it would wage in Iraq, topped other Iraq-related terms like "rush to war," "weapons of mass destruction" and "spider-hole" as the top phrase of 2003.