Category: Journalism

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That Blair-Bush-Al Jazeera memo finally getting some notice in the US

Salon’s among the first of the US’s online left-wing magazines to pick up on the now-infamous UK memo that hinted that President Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera. It’s a run-through of events at the time of the memo, so you get to see everything in context. Whether the memo is being correctly reported or not, it’s clear Rummy and co have gone through the looking glass on a couple of issues.

Salon’s usual take – why has the mainstream media not picked up on this until now? – is starting to annoy though: you are the mainstream media; stop acting like you’re outsiders still. Why didn’t you pick this up until now? It’s not like you wouldn’t have known within minutes via a Google News subscription, and your content deals with The Guardian and Der Spiegel surely would have helped if you had missed it.

Perhaps if Salon could refrain from the kind of preaching that gives liberals a bad name in the US and put its efforts into making its voice heard, maybe other media outlets would join in instead of ignoring otherwise important events.

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“Wooden tongue” writing

It doesn’t matter how hard you try to explain to management types, they all think there’s some sort of virtue in their stilted jargon. The English language is a thing of beauty and subtlety; writing what you think is more likely to make people trust you than if you write empty, meaningless sentences that say nothing. These facts don’t seem to sway them.

Let us all launch a united attack on “wooden tongue” writing. People must learn to be interesting.

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What it takes to be a sub

What does it take to be a sub (Americans who are mystified, I’m talking about copy editors here, not sandwiches or submarines)? Some people drift into it, some people train for it. Whatever the entry route, you need to have an appreciation for language, a knowledge of the law, an understanding of production and design, the ability to write, a pedantic need to check facts and an eye for spotting mistakes at least.

Not any more though.

Continue reading “What it takes to be a sub”

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Magazine about open source, made with open source

Here’s an interesting concept: a magazine about open source in the enterprise that’s been put together using only open source software.

That’s the claim anyway. Given that there’s no print version, only a PDF version, I imagine they could just about put the whole thing together without needing a Mac; since The GIMP can’t handle CMYK and spot colours, it would have been tricky doing image editing anyway (there are plug-ins, I know, but they’re rudimentary at best. Any duotone as long as it’s red and black?).

There are two problems with it:

  1. It looks rubbish. That’s true of most US trade mags, but this has the design quality you’d expect of something put together with Microsoft Word. Two column layouts with a third, bastard column: fair enough. But if you put a subhead in the first column and don’t calculate the leading and spacing correctly, the second column’s baselines won’t match up, which is exactly what’s happened throughout. The designers appear only to be able to cope with pictures running over two columns, as well, turning most articles in swathes of impenetrable text. This is not a good advert for open source DTP software.
  2. The writing is awful. Most of the content is written by CTOs and techies and I fell asleep within seconds. For a magazine supposedly aimed at CIOs, there’s an amazingly large amount of material covering installing from source, the size of downloads and so on. And an article covering Boolean syntax in Google metadata searches? WTF?

Most trade mags get sent through the post, so require minimal effort on the part of the reader to obtain the latest edition. O3 may be free, but people will have to want to download it to read it. That’s not going to happen, based on this issue. Maybe it’ll find its feet with later issues, which is the usual pattern of most mags.

I suspect that O3 is either going to have a short lifespan or it’s going to have one of those slow, protracted deaths where people keep providing copy and working for nothing – the magazine keeps getting produced but the quality is so poor, no one ever reads it.

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Sucking in three languages. Or maybe four.

So I’m on the phone, trying to set up an interview – in French. It’s going well. I can understand her, even though she starts our conversation off in German, just to throw me. She can understand me, even though she’s French and normally only non-French French speakers can understand me.

Then she hits me with the double-whammy of “Your French is very good” (why, merci beaucoup!) and “You can speak in English if you want” (if my French is good, why would you say that?) then starts speaking in English. So now I’m having trouble “code switching” and can speak neither French nor English – I hate it when that happens.

But then things get worse. She asks me a question and instead of “Yes” or “Oui”, I say “Si”. Normally, I’m pretty much guaranteed to start speaking German accidentally at times like this, but I actually started speaking Spanish. How odd is that, given I’m still on “Week 4” of Instant Spanish? It wouldn’t have mattered so much if it weren’t for the fact “Si” means something almost completely the opposite in French.

So now I suck in four languages, including English. Brilliant.

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There’s no free speech in Britain

Just in case you thought we lived in a free society, here’s a little something to put a damper on that thought. The government is threatening to sue newspapers under the Official Secrets Act if they reveal the contents of a memo that reveal a disagreement between Tony Blair and George Bush over the way the Iraq war is being conducted. That seems a worthwhile use of the Act, doesn’t it? That’s the kind of thing we need to clamp down on or else our enemies will destroy us. So much for our so-called Freedom of Information Act, which seems to be more or less voluntary at times (Give us the information. No. Okay).

In case you’re interested about some of our other free speech limitations, there are also D-Notices, our blasphemy laws and our libel laws.

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Sunday magazine round-up

It’s Sunday, so why don’t we look at what’s been in some of this week’s magazines?

The Economist and the New Statesman both had articles on Venezuela which came to surprisingly similar conclusions in some respects. Both magazines concluded Chávez’s treatment of the foreign oil companies drilling in Venezuela was reasonably justified. Odd that, given that New Statesman’s article was written by the highly left-wing John Pilger and The Economist is pretty much a standard-bearer for right-wing neo-liberal economics. I guess the one thing we can conclude is the oil companies had it coming.

New Statesman is an odd magazine that proves the rule that 90% of everything is rubbish. Apart from the Pilger piece, there were only a couple of stand-out pieces: new columnist Ziauddin Sardar’s look at Hizb ut-Tahrir; and Charlotte Raven’s review of Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? a book I suspect, despite my best attempts at sunniness and optimism, will be a must-have on my Christmas present list. Otherwise, pretty much everything in NS was as the book suggested. It’s the first time I’ve ever read it through, other than to skim bits in WH Smith, so I might try their trial offer (13 issues for £4.99) and see if it grows on me.

The ever-excellent Economist also had an intriguing article on language development, which raises as many questions, if not more, than it answers. The only thing more surprising was that New Scientist didn’t cover the study to perk up what was a relatively limp issue this week.

Last item of note this week was from The Guardian’s Bad Science, looking at why the BBC’s science coverage in the news is so embarrassingly bad. The particular story cited took my breath away in its science-fiction stupidity. How can they let this rubbish on the air?!

Oh well.