Of Gambling and Schools

The Daily Illini did a commendable job with their Friday cover story. Reporter Sarah Small gets it most of the time, which is impressive, due to the subject matter. Let's take it sequentially, starting with the anecdotal lede:
Scott Johnson, junior in LAS, played his first online poker game at the age of 13. Within a week of his first time playing, he had won $900. Three hours later, he lost all of his money.

Looks all good to me -- thus far. Johnson’s age looks good, and so does the $900. Let’s see if this gets interesting.

Johnson turned 18 his first day at the University as a freshman, and during his first days on campus, he won $3,000. He cashed out $1,000 of this and lost $2,000. Since the first time he played an online poker tournament, Johnson has experienced the ups and downs of winning and losing.

Here we run into a hodgepodge of numerals. The second sentence here is a bit choppy. Maybe I’m a little magazine-y here, but I’d change $1,000 to something like “a grand,” and then follow with, “lost the remainder.”

This story is a pretty solid one -- but it could use some liveliness. That’s a tall order for a numeral-centric story such as this. Small does well with the story, but it’s not quite perfect.

Politics and the English Language

Eric Blair. As much as any man, he shaped the English language as a whole, as well as supplying vernacular: doublespeak, mindcrime, Big Brother. His work was so salient his name has become a term in and of itself: Orwellian. I believe he was aware of his standing in the world of letters, and he was very conscious of what it means to be a writer. This might be best expressed in the introductory paragraph to his 1945 essay, "Politics and the English Language."

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Modern English is full of lazy idioms and weak writing; a congenital linguistic malaise. Orwell disposed of this poverty with alacrity: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, meaningless words and pretentious diction were all on his hit list. Take heed, young writers; for when you trot out another tired “throughout all history” phrase, Orwell will be turning in his grave. Big Brother is watching, as it were.

On John McIntyre

OK, so outsourcing copy editing to Bangalore is probably not the greatest of ideas. However, let's take it point by point with McIntyre's column (quick question: if McIntyre wasn't a relative name in the industry, would he still have a job at the Sun? A lot of old dogs have been getting cut out in the past few years). The examples he uses on local geography are exaggerated at best. Google (and its Maps application) get you to the pertinent information in a matter of seconds. In fact, perhaps in the length of time it takes Mr. Older Copyeditor to ask around the water cooler to confirm parallel streets, our enterprising Indian may have already Google Earthed up the answer. In fact, after being the "beat" for long enough, the outsource employee might develop a pretty solid understanding of Respective Small Market Newspaper Town. Not that I do not agree with McIntyre on a number of points in general, as described on his rather pleasant blog. The guy really really does know and appreciate the beauty of the English language, without being didactic about the whole thing. At the same time, he might want to do a bit more hypothetical fact-checking of his thought experiments. Just a thought.

Semicolon: Semiawesome.

As you well know, the semicolon is like the delicious, tart kiwi fruit: underused, and often when it is finally used, the results are atrocious: kiwi-strawberry juice, anyone? When the semicolon is used properly; however, the results can be majestic. Want to join a pair of sentences but not use a conjunction? Our friend the semicolon can join those clauses together beautifully; it rebels against the tyranny of "and." To this end, one Dictionary Evangelist is in the process of forming the Semicolon Appreciation Society. Of course, the Times has a beautiful piece on the mark, as well as the readers' eloquent comments.

Obviously, due to the stylistic standards (constraints?) of newspapering, the semicolon is often relegated to parsing out of lists, especially in the description department. If you're a magazine writer, as I aspire to be, the semicolon (kids call it the SC) gets into the action a little more. I find a particular magic in the one sentence, semicolon joined paragraph, preferably laid in between a pair of larger paragraphs. The nature of the full, joint clauses creates an incredible pleasing and poetic symmetry to the prose; the section becomes greater than the whole of its parts.

On "Transforming American Newspapers"

Vin Crosbie gets just about gets it. Indeed, better than most. He successfully spots the elephant in the middle of the newsroom again and again, and often with eloquent, emotional language, the sort of thing that moves the soul (or moves you to use Mr. Crosbie's consulting firm, terrific!). The miasma of lethargy emanating from American papers is quite pungent, and he rightly calls it out: “{they} have long been too financially impatient to submit themselves to anything but ostensibly quick cures and they've even longer been too conceptually myopic to perceive the real reasons for their declines.”

As a cheerfully disaffected youth who has come of age with the Internet – I had a part in what you'd call a group blog in 9th grade or so – I have wrung my hands as I learn more about journalism in our age, and just how out of touch news organizations are, just look at the stocks Crosbie lists.

I agree with Crosbie when he says that advertisers' flight from print is a symptom and not the disease. I agree with him when he says that most all regional papers will evaporate. However, he gets a little beyond himself when he says that the big nationals – USA Today, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – are all going to fold or otherwise be unrecognizable. While I lack the depth of research of Crosbie, I am inclined to comment that people have some sort of attachment to the printed word. It might be useful to go straight to the horse's mouth, the exec ed of the Times, Bill Keller, from a talk to the newsroom Q&A.

“What makes a newspaper is not the paper. It's resources and values. It's reporters and editors. It's the difficult and expensive and sometimes dangerous business of deploying talented people to witness events, ferret out information wherever it is buried, and try to make sense of it. It's a rigorous set of standards, enforced by experienced editors.”

I'll have to defer to Keller for the moment. But maybe he and Crosbie are in agreement.