The Last Day

It is my last day at The Greeley Tribune.

Sigh.

I have edited, rewritten, designed, fixed, written, and researched.
I can use Quark, NewsEdit, and Photoshop quite easily.
I have laughed at the sports guys, the silly citizen commentators, and the Greality page.
I've listened to complaints from all sides of the spectrum, joined in on a few of them, and rolled my eyes at others.

But most of all, what I think I'll carry the furthest from this experience is how much power a group of seven people had over what kind of news an entire community received. It actually scared me a couple of times, when I was editing a story for length, how whatever I cut out could make all the difference in the world as to the feeling people had in their stomachs after they read the article. Sick? Butterflies? Excitement? Satisfaction?

Editors have power, more power (sometimes) than the writers themselves. When the story is on the page and you have three lines of space and ten lines of text, you can only squish the letters together so far. Sometimes you have to chop out an entire sentence, or two halves of different sentences. Do you leave in the context, or take it out, and hope that the quote stands on its own? If one side of the issue shows optimistic and pessimistic views, which one do you leave in? So many images are based on what people read in the paper, or what they think they read in the paper.

This is why I'm starting to think that online newspapers are a great idea. You don't have to cut down for space when you have a virtual abyss to fill with words. These value judgments won't be left to people who have no problem simply cutting out the last half of the story, ignoring the fact that the best view of the other side of the issue is in that half.

Taped to the monitor of the copy desk chief's computer is a list of questions that you can ask yourself to ensure that you make good ethical decisions. Here are a few of them:

1. What do I know? What do I need to know?
...4. What organizational policies and professional guidelines should I consider?
...6. Who are the stakeholders -- those affected by my decision? What are their motivations? Which are legitimate?
...9. What are my alternatives to maximize my truthtelling responsibility and minimize harm?

The list is numbered to ten, though you can see that several numbers have multiple questions. How many editors have something like this right in front of their eyes, always reminding them to be balanced? Very few, from what I've noticed.

Maybe we should stop gasping when politicians actually speak their minds (thank you, Joe Biden) and just write it all down. Don't try to cover leaders' tracks. Let it sit out there and stew, and then perhaps the public will be best-informed, not just well-informed.

Save the Daily Planet!

I'm sorry. I can't help myself. This has to be one of the funniest political cartoons I've seen in a while. It came from http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/politicalcartoons/ig/Political-Cartoons/Saving-Newspapers.htm

The affected effect

I want to share with you all one of the most helpful things I have EVER found on the internet. How many of you have ever been in the middle of writing a paper, when you suddenly had to stop and whisper to yourself, "Affect. Effect. Eeeeffect...Uhhhhhffect? Crud..."

Although I'm sure very few of you actually say, "crud," like I do. Anyway, a simple solution to this problem does exist, though I can't take any of the credit for it. This explanation comes from Grammar Girl, a person who is, not even joking, now one of my heroes.

Here're her word-y explanations of which is who and why and all:

"Affect

Affect with an a means "to influence," as in, "The arrows affected Ardvark," or "The rain affected Amy's hairdo." Affect can also mean, roughly, "to act in a way that you don't feel," as in, "She affected an air of superiority."

Effect

Effect with an e has a lot of subtle meanings as a noun, but to me the meaning "a result" seems to be at the core of all the definitions. For example, you can say, "The effect was eye-popping," or "The sound effects were amazing," or "The rain had no effect on Amy's hairdo.""

But the best part is how she illustrates it:
Now, whenever I am writing about the effects of hurricanes and how they have affected peoples' living situations, I picture those blue aardvarks in my head. It's quite possible that in some countries, this is an illness.
The only thing left now is for someone to tell me which crazy person decided that two words with two such highly related meanings would have the same phonetic sounds.

Something else I noticed while I was editing today: One of the shorter articles (called a "breakout," as if its set-apart style is jumping the electric fence of a newspaper penitentiary) had parts of it highlighted. Of course, I suddenly had a flashback to my middle school history and science books, many of which had important words and phrases in bold type so that our young minds would know to pay attention to them.

I always knew that journalists are supposed to write for an average 8th-grade-level reader, but isn't that going a little too far? If you're going to do our studying for us, why not just give us bullet points?

"Good" policy

"[Republicans and Democrats have finally gotten together to hash out this state budget problem]...it is time to put aside politics and make good policy." -Rep. Mike May, Parker, CO.

Since when are politicians not devoted to making good policy? Oh, yeah, since we're so devoted to a two-party system of politicians running around and screaming, "Every man for himself!"

I always thought, while I was in France, why anyone would want a political system that takes longer than twenty minutes to explain to a person who hasn't grown up with it. I dream of a world when one of the things to make our lives the most complicated would be the simplest part of them.

Freedom of Speech

It occurred to me a couple of minutes ago that I could have been using my blog to pretend to write editorials. Opinion pages are usually really interesting, anyway, and it would have allowed me to, well, editorialize. Isn't that the fun part about being a part of a newspaper? You get to say whatever you want, whenever you end up printing something that you didn't really agree with; or when you want to add something to an on-going argument.

Since I have a couple of minutes before I get my next project, I thought I'd do my own little commentary on a guest column from Friday's Tribune (page AA4), written by Charles Martinez. He doesn't specifically mention any arguments or postings, but he does speak generally about how disappointing it is that we the people have turned instant communication gratification into some sort of monster.

I guess I at least mostly agree with the points he makes. People seem to take advantage of whatever opportunity they can to prove that they are, in fact, complete idiots. If you read almost any block of comments--and I really do mean "any"--you'll see for yourself. Take, for instance, the youtube.com video of Susan Boyle singing "I dreamed a dream" from Les Misérables. There are many videos, and each video, of course, has gotten different comments. The video hyperlinked above has what I would consider to be uplifting comments.

Another video, which I have either lost, or whose comments have been erased since my fellow copyeditors showed it to me, was literally covered with f***, c***, s***...pretty much the entire ABCs of foul, offensive language. I really hope that the reason I can't find this particular version is that someone complained and had it removed. Why does something so amazing need to be destroyed like that? Words are so powerful, from broken promises to blessings, and throwing them like mud on Starry Night is not only mindless, it's revolting.

Mr. Martinez was also referring to the fact that when it comes to web comments on newspaper articles, it seems that only those who have charged themselves with being proven to be brilliant (yet who are not) actually write anything. I always believed that deep down, everyone just wanted to show up everyone else (hurrah for capitalism! or is it just human nature?), but in all of my time editing people's essays and whatnot, I have never been so amazed with the sorts of things that people say about one another, whether anonymously or not, as I have while working for a newspaper.

"You're an idiot."
"Those silly Republicans."
"Those silly Democrats." (as if saying those two things is insulting)
"You're going to hell."

These are only summarizations of some of the things I've read. I've inserted commas to fix run-on sentences, articles to fix thoughts, and I've changed spellings so that whatever the commentator was saying wouldn't make them look like a complete doofus. Why do I even do that, I ask myself, if they're just going to do it again? Sometimes I wish I could rewrite what they've told us to print on the opinion page, but that's completely out of the question. You only fix commas, not thoughts. You can't change people. And besides, that would be censoring and hiding the truth from the people.

And, well, I'd rather the community know what kind of people were living in it. It's nice to have checks and balances on politicians; I wish we could put harnesses on normal people. Or maybe make it required for them all to have nasal septum rings. We could tie all the stupid ones together and yank on their common rope when they felt compelled to be even more rude.

Maybe that's a little overboard. OK, not a little overboard. Very overboard. Like, in the water surrounded by killer whales overboard. At least when they eat me, I will be contributing to the 100,000 (about) killer whales from around the world. My life will help them live.

Also, I got in to Western Michigan University's summer translation program! OK, so maybe it's not a huge feat, but it makes me happy! This means I'll be spending the month of July in Michigan (please, no one tell me about the humidity), learning about the business of translation and hopefully also keeping up on my French.

A successful day of pagination

Pagination is such a great word. It doesn't quite roll off of your tongue, but it has a sort of fantastic consonant-vowel ratio that I just can't seem to get over.
pAHgination. PAGEination. pgntin. paguhnatin.

It's been a long day, you see, and since it's almost completely over with, I find myself thinking again about how much I have to do, how much I have done, and how much I just want to win a couple of millions of dollars and just write and never work again.
Isn't it lovely to have dreams?

I did a very good job of keeping track of everything I did at work today--I hope my professor enjoys the huge pile of before-and-afters that I printed out. It was actually the first day that I really paid attention to doing that; I don't know why I didn't really do it during my preceeding weeks at the Tribune. It does take a little bit of extra work, but not too much. I did not, however, take home all the printouts that I simply copyedited. We lose track of those rather quickly, and I'd rather not force people to stop working for ten minutes just to find those six or seven pages I looked at. It seems even more useless since usually the only things wrong with the pages at that point is misplaced commas and some random misspellings.

Today I put together the Obits page, and a pseudo-business page dedicated to April 15. I had to do a LOT of story trimming for that second one, which is good, because I love actually slicing apart things and putting the puzzle together. It must be like the feeling a surgeon gets when he or she is performing a major surgery. I just don't get any blood anywhere.

Of course, when I was literally seven lines of cutting text away from finishing the jigsaw, I did something very silly. In seeing if everything would fit if I just moved the letters closer together, I highlighted the entire story, clicked in the em space box, hit some keys, pressed enter, and gasped in horror when I looked back up at my empty columns. Oops. Of course, I began to laugh. Seven lines away, and the last time I had saved, I had been about 20 lines away. The things I do to myself to make my life easier.

Luckily, I am not alone! Ryan laughed at me (ahem, with me) and talked me through going back to the original copy and finding the last time I saved the page...oy. I was able to get back to where I was, and it was beautiful. Then I waited, silently striving to disguise my concern over being congratulated or not, to get his corrections back. OK, so in reality I sort of forgot that I had given him the page because I was working on editing other things. BUT he liked the headlines that I came up with, even if one of them was a little off. That in itself makes me happy--for some reason, I am terrible at coming up with titles and headlines. It's like I read into the story so much differently than some people do, and then I also want to do something creative; and it just never goes perfectly.

So that was the day. I'm glad that the longest day of my week is over with, but I also feel a lot of tension about all the research I have to do before the end of next week. It doesn't help that the majority of people I graduated from highschool with are getting their university diplomas in a month. Of course, I do enjoy knowing that most of them are freaking out and having panic attacks and as of yet have neither job nor plan, and that makes me happy in a very sadistic sort of way.

I should be careful, though: that'll be me in November.

Editorials

NB: This post technically was begun last week. Busy-ness really takes away from productivity, doesn't it?

A "Two Cents" piece from page AA4 of Friday's Tribune:

"Zeke N. needs to get a life"
'Just calling because every time I see Zeke N. in the paper, it's a negative report about the paper. It's amazing that he's always in the paper. He needs to get a life.'
-This amuses me mostly because it's so incredibly true, I can hardly take it. Zeke N. invades every editorial page that he possibly can. I don't mind participation, but when the only things you have to say are the same things every day.....And then you have the person who notices that Zeke is calling in or commenting every day. Hm.

The first paragraph from the front page of the Adventure section, page AA1:

"Rocky Mountain National Park is once again temporarily closing the Lumpy Ridge and Sheep Mountain areas to protect raptor nesting sites."
-Did you know that raptors are birds (cue the giggles)? Because I didn't know that, I had to look it up. Here I was, having flashbacks of Jurassic Park, and all they were talking about were birds of prey. Actually, I'm just a tad bit disappointed. I was hoping for dinosaurs.

A random thing about editing that really bothers me: Not using the last comma in lists of things.
For example:
"But Pinnacol, business groups and lawmakers are still at odds..."
"We should stick to the facts instead of using empty rhetoric that punishes people working, fighting and sacrificing for our country..."
I always feel like I have to say the last two things in the list super fast; which is why, when I write on my own, I always insert the comma. I like to breathe, you know? Get some air in my lungs (or in the lungs of my readers) before jumping to the next line of business.

Story from the Associated Press:
"President Barack Obama asked Congress on Thursday for $83.4 billion for US military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing for special troop funding that he opposed two years ago when he was a senator and George W. Bush was president."
-This makes me think about all of the complaining and finger pointing that goes on when politicians in control seem to suddenly change their opinions or votes on certain issues. I wonder how many people are furious that Obama changed his vote in this case? I mean, that is a rather large chunk of money, right? Of course it is. But one thing that people don't often realize: We change, things change. Guess our president is voting for change!

And my all-time favorite comment of the day (which comes from a long line of comments on an article about an article concerning using racial adjectives in stories):
"Instead of mentioning the emotionally charged "Robbed" or age, race, height or weight for fear of offending someone we'll abandon our job of reporting the FACTS (race, age, height, weight) of an incident and simply be happy that our advertisers and readers aren't offended.
And newspapers wonder why bloggers are the new media.....at least they call it like they see it."
-Oh, good. The bloggers are calling it like they see it. Whew. I was starting to wonder when I was going to get to hear about all of that. And this is coming from a person who enjoys reading blogs. Who enjoys writing blogs. Who doesn't seem to care that very few people see her blog. Yet one must wonder: Is what the bloggers see really so different from what a paid journalist sees? Sure it is. Paid journalists can get their news organizations to fly them to Iraq to do in-depth stories (although if you ask me, the whole "in-depth" thing in that issue is a GIANT question mark of uncertainty), while surrounded by tanks and machine guns.
Not exactly where everyone wants to be, but it gets you the story. If I were going to be a reporter, I would want to be at the front lines of everything, not sitting behind my computer commenting about articles from the New York Times. At least, I like to think I could be brave enough to be that proactive about being unbiased.
Next thing you know, we'll have to start paying to view blogs, what with this monstrous ego I sense growing over the Web.