One of the worst things that plagues newsrooms across the country is that seasoned writers either move up the chain by becoming producers, or move on to new careers. The majority of writers, or AP's, in newsrooms are fresh out of college, who spend more time posting about their new career on Twitter or Facebook then they do learning how to use the spellcheck.
Now, one would think that if you went to school as a communication or journalism major, than English would be one of your strong points. WRONG! And here's what absolutely drives me up a friggin wall -- not only do the majority of these writers have difficulty spelling, they fail to rely on spellcheck, relying on their own ego instead. Due to that we get gems like the one posted here - Child bit by car!?!?!?! While that would make for a *FABULOUS* story..I somehow doubt that was the intended text.
The station I work at has a wall of shame covered with screen captures of some of these gems. Entire websites are dedicated to calling out bad spellers. My take on the whole thing? If you are WRITING for a living...then you either:
a) Need to learn how to spell
or
b) Need to make friends with spell check or dictionary.com .
Earlier this week I was a bit glued to a tragedy unfolding for a friend of mine in Atlanta. Her husband had disappeared on the way to work on Monday.
ReplyDeleteAs part of her "army of geeks" watching it all unfold on Facebook, we enlisted the local media for some exposure. The reporter from the first station was sent out to do the story only because so many of us contacted the station.
He managed to lead the distraught wife and mother of a 20-month old into an out-of-context sound bite suggesting (through tears) that she'd "hope he'd left her"." The context was that she'd be happy for any news that he was safe but this guy decided to "sex it up" and cut it differently.
The online article had a similarly useless headline. "Wife Says Husband Missing."
Instead of mobilizing forces to start trying to find a lost man in trouble they just totally blew her off.
On Wednesday night, he arrived somehow at the house and fell through the door suffering major dehydration and kidney failure. We still don't know what happened to him, but he certainly didn't "leave her."
The paper did a follow up where the posted that he's shown up on "Thursday night" in an article posted on Wednesday.
...and they wonder why they have no credibility.
The greatest asset the "News" owns is trust. Selling that out for cheap labor is going to turn out to be a fatal mistake.