MONDAY, JULY 21, 2008

From Rim Editor to Ram the Editor

I'm feeling more than a bit xenophobic these days, and I'm blaming it on the movement to outsource newspaper copy editing services to India.

I was interviewed on this topic recently for a public radio program in New York City called "The Takeaway" with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji.

The conversation featured a 26-year-old American copy editor, Hayden Simms, whose bright eyes and bushy tail could not protect him from a Miami Herald pink slip. The premise of the program was that Simms lost his copy editing job to India and its pool of cheaper labor.

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On the line with me was Harsh Dutta, a gracious and highly intelligent man from India and co-founder of Content Writing India in New Dehli, which runs a copy editing service for clients across the world, including newspapers in the U.S. of A.

Dutta admitted that Indian copy editors were trained in "the Queen's English" and had to be schooled in the peculiarities of the American idiom. I have no doubt that our copy editing colleagues in India have enough language competence to learn the difference between labor and labour and to put the comma inside quotations marks, thank you. Language, syntax, spelling and idioms are all important, but are beside the point.

It pains me to say that the bean counters who have proposed this move have added insult to the injury of being laid off. They seemed to have reduced the craft of copy editing to its most basic functions without attention to what will be lost, including cultural literacy, institutional memory and knowledge of the community.

My recent radio rant went something like this (I've added a few points for good measure): I need copy editors to know that Eva Longoria is not the wife of Tampa Bay Rays baseball phenom Evan Longoria.  I need them to know that a Florida cracker is not something you eat, and that it may or may not be offensive to some readers. I need a Rhode Island copy editor to know that you don't dig for clams; you dig for quahogs, a word of Indian origin -- American Indian. I need copy editors who know that Jim Morrison of The Doors went to St. Pete Junior College, that beat writer Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Fla., but is buried in Lowell, Mass. I want them to know that Lakewood High School is different from Lakewood Ranch High School. I want them to know that 54th Avenue North in St. Petersburg is 108 blocks north of 54th Avenue South. 

I'd like to think that I'm a pretty bright guy, but, believe me, Mr. Dutta, you don't want me to copy edit the work of Indian journalists in New Dehli. National origin matters. Community matters. Culture matters.

My radio friend from India also recognizes that these things matter, but he assured Mr. Hockenberry that the copy editors from India, working with clients in Houston, are given a "learning module" to help them understand the local traditions. (I hope there will be a pop quiz on Enron, AstroTurf, and Billy "White Shoes" Johnson.)

No amount of book or online learning can compensate for wisdom earned on the ground. I need copy editors who are willing to be comrades and collaborative antagonists, who will drink beer with me after their shifts, who love this community as much as I love it, who know you can get great chili dogs at Coney Island and the best barbecue in town at Big Tim's.

I need copy editors who are more than comma catchers. I need them to be language masters, the last line of defense, the standard bearers of what my newspaper stands for, my safety net. I want to be able to walk up to a copy editor's desk and say "great catch, thanks for saving my ass." Must I now learn the Hindi word for ass?

My friend and colleague Howard Finberg, who once worked as a newspaper copy editor, has told me he views the erosion of the copy desk as a more troubling development than the loss of reporters and the retreat from some traditional beats. I think he's right.

When it comes to the outsourcing of this crucial journalistic function, at a time when we say we want the news to be even more local, let's take our stand -- at the border's edge. 

Posted at 2:34:42 PM

WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2008

Proof That Remnick Is Wrong

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In a world awash in random irony and snarky cynicism, it is wise to consider the healing words of David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Defending satire and his choice of cover art, Remnick told National Public Radio that he disagreed with those critics who thought that rank and file Americans would not get the humor in the cover. Yes, the Obamas are pictured as terrorists with a flaming American flag and photo of Bin Laden in the background. But the magazine does not mean that the Obamas are really terrorists. The artist and editor mean the opposite.

Remnick objected to the notion that only sophisticated New Yorkers would get the satire. He expressed the more egalitarian notion that even people in the heartland would get it.

But the record of Americans "getting it" is spotty at best. One of the most celebrated cases involves a magazine's publication of a short story by Shirley Jackson called "The Lottery." This chilling little story, which first appeared in 1948, remains a staple of high school literature classes. Its use of foreshadowing and suspense, its tight construction and its cold brevity make it a perfect vehicle for instruction.

"The Lottery" tells the story of a small rural community that conducts a yearly ritual. Each summer the townspeople gather in the square and one of them wins the lottery, with lots chosen out of an old black box. The winner? Oh, she gets stoned to death.

The story, a fictional critique of the kind of scapegoating carried out by the Nazis a few years earlier, caused quite a stir among readers, a ruckus unprecedented in the history of the magazine, and one that Jackson would write about at length.

Her essay called "Biography of a Story" begins this way: "On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. ... I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic. ... It was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name."

I won't wait any longer to reveal what you may by now have guessed, that "The Lottery" first appeared in The New Yorker magazine, and that hundreds of nasty letters came to Jackson, including one from her mother, who did not "get" what she was doing.

"I have all the letters still," Shirley wrote, "and if they could be considered to give any accurate cross section of the reading public, or the reading public of The New Yorker, or even the reading public of one issue of The New Yorker, I would stop writing now."

She goes on, "Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at. ... The New Yorker never published any comment of any kind about the story in the magazine, but did issue one publicity release saying that the story had received more mail than any piece of fiction they had ever published."

What follows is a scary sampling of the letters:

Kansas: "Will you please tell me the locale and the year of the custom?"
Oregon: "Where in heaven's name does there exist such barbarity as described in the story?"
New York: "Do such tribunal rituals still exist and if so where?"

And on, and on, and on.

Ten years before publication of "The Lottery," another fictional story bamboozled an American audience. A 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles of "The War of the Worlds," a dramatic narration of an invasion of Earth by Martian monsters, sent listeners into panic and inspired journalist Dorothy Thompson to cite the event as "the story of the century."

She wrote in the November 2, 1938 edition of the New York Herald Tribune:

"All unwittingly Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nation-wide panic.

"They have demonstrated more potently than any argument ... the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery.

"They have cast a brilliant and cruel light upon the failure of popular education.

"They have shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands.

"They have uncovered the primeval fears lying under the thinnest surface of the so-called civilized man.

"They have shown that man, when the victim of his own gullibility, turns to the government to protect him against his own errors of judgment.

"The newspapers are correct in playing up this story over every other news event in the world.  It is the story of the century."

In an National Public Radio interview with a group of women supporting John McCain, it was dispiriting to hear people insist that Obama was raised as a Muslim in spite of the cold evidence to the contrary.  When those people pass a magazine rack and see the image on The New Yorker cover, Mr. Remnick, they will, I guess, nod approvingly rather than see it as a sophisticated piece of satire. 

Posted at 8:06:19 PM

TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2008

Numb Nuts: Newspapers Are Stupid

I can't imagine what George Carlin is thinking today as he laughs down at us from heaven or up at us from heck. Oh, yeah, I used heck so as not to offend the readers of this Web site, especially the children who might stumble upon this post on their way to Romenesko.

I guess old Carlin didn't know that nuts was one of those words you can't say on television or put in a newspaper. Gosh (euphemism for God), if you put nuts in the paper, people, especially young people, might stop reading it.

I hope by now you get my drift. I agree wholeheartedly with Howard Kurtz that newspapers should have quoted Jesse Jackson in full when he whispered this about Barack Obama on a Fox open microphone:

"See Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based. I wanna cut his nuts off. Barack, he's been talking down to black people."

When the controversy broke, I wondered, like most other folks, what Jackson said that was so offensive it could not be printed in the newspaper. In the early reports, I read phrases such as "crude remark" about doing something to Obama, or emasculate, and then finally castrate.

Wow, I thought, castrate.

I cannot speak for other men, but, to me, castrate is one of the worst words in the English language.  It conjures everything from old cruel Italian efforts to preserve angelic voices in choir boys, to suggested punishments for child abusers, to the desires of scorned women like Lorena Bobbitt, to, most horrific, the punishment imposed by some slaveholders against uppity or rebellious slaves.

It is in that context that Jackson's remarks are most remarkable: that he would not say that he'd like to knock down that kid a peg or two, or slap that arrogant grin off his face, or even kick his skinny ass to kingdom come. Instead, Jackson chose to appropriate the slaveholder's horrific threat against another black man. In offensive parlance I've learned from my African-American colleagues, it was as if Jackson were a plantation owner accusing Obama of being a "house nigger," a privileged black man who spoke down to other black people.

But such argument is impossible UNLESS WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT JACKSON SAID.

I'll take my argument one step forward: By veiling Jackson's actual words, the news media may have created the impression that he said something worse. To say that you'd like to cut someone's nuts off is, among other things, what language experts call a dysphemism, a word or phrase that is harsher than your true meaning and intent. If I'm wrong about that, let's make sure we keep Jackson away from the cutlery. Dysphemisms often convey a sense that the speaker is exaggerating for effect.

Castrate is meant to serve as a euphemism for nut cutting, the way the most proper prefer urinate to piss. As in: "That Jesse Jackson must have been really urinated off at Barack Obama to say such a thing." Alas, castrate contains none of the mitigating slang outrageousness of nuts, which means the news media managed to turn a euphemism into a dysphemism, a colossal act of linguistic incompetence. Shame. 

Posted at 6:07:01 PM

THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2008

Fragging Without Shame

I sit at this moment in my doctor's office staring at my cholesterol numbers, and they are not good. Too much pizza and Pepsi, I guess. I look up and notice two pieces of office art: a scale model of the human heart and the head of a giant alligator. The gator looks like he is about to eat the heart. It is not a comforting image for a guy whose cholesterol numbers are 70 points higher than his I.Q.

I avert my eyes, which now catch the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine. The headline reads:

Why the Pope Loves America

U.S. Catholics May Confound Him, but America Doesn't. On the Eve of His Papal Visit, a Look at How This Country Has Shaped Benedict XVI.

It occurs to me that the first and last of those sentences are fragments, which means that only the middle one can stand independently as a complete thought: "U.S. Catholics may confound him, but America doesn't."

Lots of meaning is packed into one complete sentence and two intentional fragments. The key word is intentional.

A college student once told me she liked to use fragments in her writing, but that her composition teacher corrected her every time. "Would you let me use fragments?" she asked. I told her I'd feel better about giving her permission if I knew that she understood the difference between an intentional and unintentional fragment, that is, between a strategy and a mistake.

A useful insight about language reveals that some words -- ones that would make a sentence complete -- are understood by the reader or listener, even if those words are missing from the text. If I should yell "Go to hell!" the subject is understood to be "you." But what if I said or wrote, "When hell freezes over!"? That clause has a subject and a verb, but cannot stand alone as a sentence. Yet its clarity and context keep it from being a mistake. The reader provides what is missing from information supplied earlier. "When hell freezes over!" can mean "I'll move to Florida when hell freezes over," or "I'll root for the Red Sox when hell freezes over."

So. The intentional fragment. Not a mistake. No siree. More than that: The intentional fragment can carry several important strategic uses in a piece of writing.

The Shotgun Blast

A fragment can explode upon the reader's sensibility to bring a shocking truth into sharp relief.  Consider this passage from Mark Haddon's novel "A Spot of Bother":



That fragment -- serving as word, sentence, and paragraph -- hits the reader like a shotgun blast.

The Rest Period

The fragment can offer relief, usually in the form of a resolution to a problem. Used as a single paragraph, the fragment offers a pause, especially when it follows a long sentence. Here Haddon describes a man waking from a nightmare:




The Inventory

A series of short fragments helps the writer build a body of evidence for the reader, especially in a form that reads less like a list and more like details from a narrative. Consider this paragraph from an essay by Wright Thompson on the rise and fall of baseball slugger Mark McGwire:


The Intensifier

My friend Jennifer 8. Lee, a former member of Poynter's National Advisory Board, uses few fragments in her entertaining book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles." When she does reach for one, it always intensifies the effect she is trying to achieve. In this passage, she describes the search for a certain Chinese restaurant in Omaha, Neb.:



Notice how that single fragment, "More blankness," helps Lee build the tension toward that delicious punch line.

Turn to the back cover and you'll discover that those trying to sell the book understand the intensifying power of the intentional fragment:


Striving for Informality

You are unlikely to find many fragments in works of philosophy. That is because the fragment almost always expresses a degree of informality, except, perhaps, in works of poetry or oratory. But even in the most serious works of literature, the fragment is an irreplaceable building block of dialogue.

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Because of the sex?"

"Not just that."

"Then what?"

"Because of your mother."

I just made that up, but something tells me I've read a dozen scenes like it in novels or screenplays.

The Objective Correlative

T.S. Eliot argued that the poet is always in search of the object that correlated to a feeling or emotion the poet wants to express, hence the literary jargon: objective correlative. Watch how Jacqui Banaszynski uses the fragment to fulfill this purpose in an article she once wrote about Turkish refugees:



A fragment is a rare way to begin a newspaper story, but in this case the power of that first word toothpaste serves as the physical manifestation of a man's search for dignity for his family.

Posted at 6:44:40 PM

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