AP Style Guide Kills Web site
AP Stylebook, the writer’s go-to authority on language rules, usage, titles, and more just announced a major change. The message: “Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website.”
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Video of the Week: Magazines, The Power of Print
I am a print magazine person. I love getting lost in a well-written story, and though I now read as many blogs and news sites as print publications, I strongly defend print to those who tell me that the format is in its death throes.
Naturally, the magazine industry wants to fight the notion that it is a dinosaur fighting extinction in a new media age. So a group of powerful publishers came together on a multi-million dollar campaign to promote “The Power of Print,” kicking off with a video on YouTube. Hmmm.
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Write for Readers
The title got me, and I immediately clicked through to read a health newsletter’s article about the “25 diet-busting foods you should never eat.” Strangely enough, the most valuable information was in the comments.
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A New Site is Launched: RoadKing.com
You don’t have to drive a truck to find the new Road King website interesting. Professional drivers will see their work lives reflected in the news and stories, but anyone who has ever used the nation’s highways can find something to relate to or to learn. Almost everything that we use in our every day lives, from food to computers to clothes to toys, is brought to us by trucks.
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Thoughts from the Editor: Completing the Picture
I was excited about the UPS driver training school story for Road King as soon as I assigned it. Here was a place that took truck driving safety so seriously that they brought an elite group of driver-trainers to a three-week boot camp on driving safely. Our writer, David Kolman, nailed the details — rules of the road shouted out on demand, timed inspections, barked orders and exhausted trainees pushing themselves so they wouldn’t wash out.
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Jargon be Gone!
As soon as employees read the words, “synergistic opportunities” their eyes glaze over. Similarly, when customers read self-congratulatory prose about process management improvements, you’ve lost them. While the news being shared may be relevant or even critical to the intended audience, if it is masked in corporate jargon, it will never be heard. One of the most important things a CEO can do to improve his or her communication skills is to stop thinking about the audience and instead focus on the people in it.
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Proofing Counts
Ever picked up a magazine or scanned a website and noticed a misspelled word or grammar mistake? Errors on the printed page or the digital screen can impact a reader’s impression of a publication, brand or writer. So, how do you ensure your company’s proofing process is comprehensive enough to maintain your stellar corporate image? Parthenon editors Nancy Henderson and Katie Neal offer the following advice…
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Display Copy Tricks & Tips
That sigh of relief when an article is done can easily morph into a case of writer’s block when it’s time to come up with a headline. So a lot of people just throw something together, forgetting to put the same care and effort into headlines, subheads and pull quotes that they do when crafting a story. But readers use those elements to decide whether they will actually take the time to read the full story.
So how do you fashion a headline and subhead that draws the reader in? How do you pull out ideas or quotes from an article that make the person skimming through pages stop and read every word?
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The Making of a Great Article
The basics of storytelling don’t change much, no matter what you’re writing. Granted, celebrities may be more fun to write […]
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No Offense
Don't we all know better now? The best trained journalists in newspaper and television are in the midst of examining whether their coverage of Hillary Clinton was sexist. Fox News apologized for a headline about Michelle Obama that they probably thought was clever, but was, in fact, a slur. Entire websites are devoted to pointing out examples of stories or quotes in the mainstream press that show prejudice, intolerance or reinforce stereotypes. This happens at large media companies, so it can certainly happen at small, non-media companies. Nobody deliberately injects bias in a company publication or website, but it can slip in unintentionally and hurt or anger readers.
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All Is Not Fair
Brush up on copyright law to avoid conflict
In June, a little-known blog got an unsettling letter from the Associated Press, the country's foremost news wire service. The AP, whose stories are printed in newspapers nationwide, ordered the blog to remove all posts that quoted its stories — and indicated that more sites might receive such notices. The story set the blogosphere buzzing, and within hours, the AP had softened its attack, but the surrounding issues linger. As a recent article in Business Week notes, media organizations are increasingly employing content recognition software to crawl the Web round-the-clock looking for improper use of their copyrighted content. And as the AP incident illustrates, these days you don't have to be one of the most heavily trafficked sites to get caught using something without permission.