January 5, 2006

Lessons to be learned from the miner debacle

My former news editor, the hon­or­able Fred Vultee has a great dis­cus­sion going about what you can, can’t, and def­i­nitely should put in a head­line about the status of trapped coal miners.

I wasn’t paying ter­ri­bly much atten­tion to the story until the story became about the story — metajournalism?

I couldn’t believe the shoddy sourc­ing the papers, and TV, were using. (Ok, I could believe TV was using such shoddy sourc­ing.) The gov­er­nor heard from a rel­a­tive at the church who got a phone call from some­one else — give me a break!

While I was read­ing about the afore­men­tioned shoddy sourc­ing I kept hear­ing this voice in my head saying, “says who?”

“Says who?!”

The voice was Fred’s. That phrase was one of many I’d often hear him saying to me, or the copy edi­tors we we’re super­vis­ing at the Mis­sourian.

Fred’s got a great list­serv for cur­rent and former Mis­sourian copy edi­tors, headsup, that’s always been a fun time, at least for people who think copy edit­ing is fun (a small minor­ity of which I’m proud to be a member).

Bowing to Web 2.0 pres­sure, or just because he can, Fred has added a blog aptly named headsupthe­blog.

So, to make my long blog entry short, Fred’s got some great thoughts on the whole miner deba­cle going that you should read, but I thought this was a par­tic­u­larly good nugget o’ wisdom ™(patent pending):

It reminds us, or ought to remind us, of a few phrases that ought to be trans­lated into Latin and etched in stone above the copy desk, so we can point to them when needed:

1. If attri­bu­tion is part of the story, it’s part of the hed.
2. Spec­u­la­tion isn’t con­fir­ma­tion.
3. Rep­e­ti­tion isn’t con­fir­ma­tion.

Filed under: Journalism

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