Well, it isn’t likely, but I always begin a year with that great hope — and very little else. There is no reason to be confident. Our leaders want to diminish the rights of the Constitution because it will make them more comfortable and more secure in their power. The people seem to buy these […]

JPROF celebrates its second birthday today. This is one of those things that “the world will little note nor long remember” (Abraham Lincoln, a big supporter of JPROF). Still, we pause for a moment. I’ve had a lot of fun putting this thing together and then adding to it over the last couple of years. […]

One of the first topics that JPROF.com tackled (which is coming up on its second birthday in less than a week) was that of how a news web site that didn’t have access to syndicated photos could stay visually current. There are a few sites that provide free photos, such as DefenseLink, that we pointed […]

It has been several weeks since any new entry appeared on this site. That’s certainly not due to a lack of issues and events to write about. It’s more a case of my inefficiency — and the fact that we have been busy at the University of Tennessee launching a news web site for the […]

Once again, commas are in the news. Well, make that once in a blue moon. In a speech the other day, George W. Bush said that eventually the war in Iraq would be seen as “just a comma” in the history books. He didn’t offer any explanation for what he meant, and his detractors have […]

If you’re a collector in the word game (as I am), keeping your redundancy box full is a fairly easy matter. All you have to do is pay attention occasionally. That’s what I was doing when I was driving along yesterday, listening to story on National Public Radio. The story was on the opening of […]

The web is a different medium. Then why do we keep seeing so much shovelware — articles that were written for print — on news web sites. One reason, of course, is that news organizations (particularly newspapers) do not invest in enough people who can change print stories into web-friendly packages. Another is that editors […]

And another offering from First Inning Artworks Check out the offering on EBay.

“In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, French commentator on the American experiment, 1835 That quotation comes from Ted Pease’s Today’s Word on Journalism, a daily email that contains a quotation about some […]

In the long history of the CBS Evening News, there had been only three permanent anchors: Douglas Edwards, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. Now there is a fourth. Katie Couric CBS biography) debuted as the newscast’s latest anchor last night. Couric is a legitimate journalist who was part of NBC’s news team covering the Pentagon […]

Few of us get to leave the impression that Joe Rosenthal did. Rosenthal was the 33-year-old Associated Press photographer who took the picture of Marines raising the flag during the fierce battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific in 1945. That image struck an instant chord with viewers, and it has been stuck in our […]

A couple of stories from Romenesko’s blog on today show that big time news organizations are discovering the immediacy of the web. One comes from Westworld, which reports that when the Denver Post stumbled onto a scoop last month about beer magnate Peter Coors being arrested for drunk driving, the Post nailed the story and […]

Sometimes punctuation can be expensive. That was certainly the case for Rogers Communications of Canada, which recently found that its misreading of a contract — not recognizing the meaning of the placement of a comma in a particular sentence of a contract — will cost the company a couple of million dollars. All this is […]

Writing is one of the most conscious and intentional acts a human can undertake. Constructing a phrase or sentence is a high-level mental activity (akin, I tell my students, to doing a complex math problem). That’s why Kaavya Viswanathan’s excuse – or, at least, explanation – for the plagiarism in her novel How Opal Mehta […]

For more than 40 years, there has been intense interest in the writing style exemplified by Gay Talese – and in Gay Talese (web site) himself. But that emphasis, particularly in Talese himself, may have been misplaced. Talese is certainly a writer of utmost grace. He works at his profession with an intensity that is […]

Headline writing is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism and certainly one of the most difficult things to teach for the journalism professor. Now — as if accuracy, clarity and a bit of wite weren’t enough — there is a new challenge: search engines. Steve Lohr writes this week in the New York […]

The sports editor of my local newspaper wrote a column this weekend that, inadvertently, summed up much of what is wrong with American newspapers. (He and the newspaper will remain un-named and un-linked.) The column must have been in reaction to some criticism the sports department had received from high school sports partisans. The newspaper […]

CBS’s “60 Minutes” is being roundly criticized for a segment that aired a couple of weeks ago on golfing phenom Tiger Woods. The piece asked no tough or searching questions of Woods, who rarely gives interviews and has carefully honed his image throughout his career. Defending the show’s approach to Woods, producer Jeff Fagin asked, […]

The New York Times has redesigned its web site, a move that is likely to draw plenty of attention and comment. There seems to be little new or innovative about the design. It gives the site a cleaner look because of its increased use of white space. What is most disappointing, however, is that the […]