Journalism: April 2008 Archives

YouTube - CKLW's 20/20 News Team

Radio news in the good old '60s and '70s -- a documentary segment about the tabloid style of news on Detroit/Windsor's Big 8: "Disk jockeys without music." Click here for CKLW soundchecks, jingles, and history. He's not in this segment, but CNN's Bob Losure was at CKLW prior to his stints in Tulsa at KRMG and KOTV. (Hat tip to KFAQ's Brian Gann.)

Hemingway's Kansas City Star stylesheet

Ernest Hemingway encountered these rules on word usage, sentence length, dates, and abbreviations during his brief stint as a reporter for the paper in 1917-18. I'd write more about them, but I'm afraid of violating a style rule in the process. (Via Dawn Eden, whose link to a different copy of the style sheet is broken, even after it was fixed once.)

Washington City Paper: Editorial Workforce Reduction at WaTi

A memo announcing layoffs at the Washington Times, via Rod Dreher, who calls it "a masterpiece of Dilberty corporate-speak," and writes, "If you want to get an idea of the mood inside the journalism business these days, wait till midnight tonight, turn off all the lights in your house, shut yourself in your bedroom closet, put on your sunglasses, pull a paper sack over your head, and stare expectantly at the future."