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Posts Tagged ‘news of the weird’

Don’t mess with the teleprompter

Posted in Broadcast media, tagged , on January 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »


This is funny, but I hope the people who got in trouble are the ones who inserted words into the on-air script just to make a public spectacle of their co-worker. There are worse things than getting a guy to say, “I love lamp,” on the air, but letting that go would just encourage them to try something else later. You don’t insert your personal, inside jokes in headlines in the newspaper or online, so I don’t know why anyone would think it’s OK to use a TV broadcast for such a thing.

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Um … Strunk and White’s Elements of Style

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on December 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The Elements of Style from Jake Heller on Vimeo.

You won’t actually learn anything from this.

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Another thing you’ll miss about newspapers

Posted in Print media, tagged , on September 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »


Ever see an iPad crease? Maybe it can happen, but I bet you can’t read it after that. But a newspaper crease, sometimes that’s the hand of God at work, perhaps a mischevous God testing to see if we’re paying attention, as when a crease merges an f and a t so that “shift” appears as sometime much more interesting. See more on the above from Charles Apple.

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But Generalissimo Francisco Franco IS still dead

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on August 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Maybe it’s a good thing that a newspaper reported incorrectly that a Seattle-area woman had been murdered in 1996. Maybe her kids will appreciate her more now. On the other hand, maybe it was wishful thinking on someone’s part.

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A dirty mind will save you embarrassment

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , on July 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

USA Today graphic
You might giggle at the sight of a weather graphic that makes it look like the sun is horny, and you might be ashamed at having the mind of a 12-year-old boy on such matters. But if only someone at USA Today had that, the paper wouldn’t be enduring several days of ridicule. As design consultant Charles Apple notes, citing several other examples, you need a dirty mind to be an editor in this business. Actually, it will help you in any business that involves putting words and images out for anyone else to see.

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That may be Jesus, but it ain’t kudzu

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , on July 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »


In a fairly egregious error, a North Carolina newspaper identified a vine that some say has grown up a pole into the form of Jesus on the cross as kudzu. I can tell just looking at the thumbnail image that it isn’t kudzu (the paper later corrected itself and identified it as trumpet vine), but come on. No one could tell before publication? Not the reporter? The photographer? The editor or page designer? You might not know what it is, but if you drive down rural Southern highways you ought to know what it isn’t. North Carolina ought to deport those involved northward.

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Burning bridges with flair

Posted in Writing, tagged on June 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

When someone who really knows how to write gets angry, he/she might tend to write it out. Some even send what they wrote, as Jack Shafer found. It probably feels good at the time.

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Wacky world of journalism

Posted in Print media, tagged on June 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Tips
A great little anecdote on a blog by Sarasota reporters about particularly odd news tips they are receiving from a reader, created ransom-note-style by cutting letters out of the newspaper to form words. If I were getting them, I’d kind of hope not to ever meet the tipster.

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