Tag Archives: subbing

NYT: Fact-checking in the online age

Great first-person piece from the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan on the process of fact-checking at newspapers past and present:

In short, fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.

Full article on the New York Times at this link…

Blogs.vocalo.org: 119 words and phrases banned in WGN-AM radio newsroom

It looks like the US has a subbing pedant to rival the Telegraph’s Simon Heffer: the Tribune Co. CEO, Randy Michaels.

Vocalo’s Robert Feder shares a memo on 119 words or phrases banned on air by Michaels. Anchors or reporters for his radio news station, WGN-AM, must never pronounce W. “dubbaya”, for example – it’s double you.  It’s “moot point” not “mute” – “but don’t say that either”. Nothing “went terribly wrong”; “undocumented aliens” are forbidden and no-one left this world in an “untimely death”. “At risk”; “legendary”, “no brainer” and “perfect storm” are also among the vocabulary victims.

Full post at this link…

Guardian.co.uk: The subbing ‘Terminator’ speaks out in print

“Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror, has become journalism’s very own Terminator,” writes his colleague Simon Hattenstone in today’s MediaGuardian.

Then (a subbed?) piece from Roy Greenslade, on the subs’ ‘fatwa’ he now faces.

Full story at this link…

Greenslade: ‘Why we don’t need subeditors’ (in his own words)

Roy Greenslade blogs about his discussion on sub-edting at yesterday’s Publishing Expo. He gives quite a bit of background before, in the 14th paragraph, picking up the point the (journalism) world is all-of-a-Tweet about:

“So I stand by what I said yesterday that we should accept that the current level of subbing numbers could be drastically reduced. In some cases, a layer of the editorial process can be eliminated altogether.”

Full post at this link…