And Now The News

Ever wonder how a TV news stories were structured?

This is a fabulous (and hilarious) deconstruction has a couple of swear words (just a reminder not the have the volume up too high at work).

It is also a reminder that if you are looking for TV to promote their cause or business to have plenty of ideas for exciting footage.

Type Gets Al's Stamp of Approval

There are millions of fonts in typography - some have a long standing tradition such as Times Roman, others are right to the minute.

Some are favoured for easy of readability in smaller typefaces (such as Times), others are more iconographic.

While most people have a choice of a dozen or so font sets with their word processing program, graphic artists can select from one from many thousands but the right choice for the job is just as important as selecting the right tool.

For instance:

l?...or ...I?

The first letter is actually a lowercase 'l' and the second is the capital I which always amuses us when we see Illinois written using Arial.

But in more serious applications - like Al Gore's sequel to his mega best seller An Inconvenient Truth - assuming context alone is not enough.

So Big Al gets one of his staffers to phone up the font foundary (that's what they're called - a throw back to the old days where typefaces were cast in lead for the movable type printers) and asks them to change the figure 1 so it looks less like an uppercase I.

Oh yes, the book is about to go to press so could they change this font in five hours please?

Not as easy as it sounds.

Changes to a well-established font family can change proportions, possibly resulting in the entire book needing to be retypeset, not to mention requiring every artist having the font Brioni to download a new character set to ensure the uniformity of text.

Find out more about this interesting story here.

It'll Never Catch On...

At last, instead of wading through emoticons or drafting long apologetic e-mail to say that you didn't really mean to say what you just said, just use...



The Sarcmark, according to the UPI story goes at the end of a sentence to denote the prior use of sarcasm - just as a question mark denotes a question.

At a $1.99 software download, we think everyone will just love it and it won't be confused for a weird @ symbol and it will be the biggest thing since Tickle Me Elmo.*

* Please note, the above sentence is sarcasm.

Why The 'Oldy' Media Risk Being The 'Mouldy' Media

A very interesting article by technology writer Tom Formeski which offers an interesting insight into how journalists see public relations (and by extension those who use PR companies). Here is Duncan's response:

Sorry Tom, but as a former journalist (12 years) and a current PR worker (10 years government and 8 years private), it seems clear to me you're pushing a mythical line when you suggest that journalists are pure as the driven snow, winkling out bias in search of the facts, and these poor innocents are often bamboozled by wicked, manipulative PR flacks who are out to hoodwink them or, worse, bribe them. The only real fact is, due to the overwhelming drive of human nature, most journalists write to their own biases and self-interest.

I was especially struck by this:

"The job of a journalist has always been one of trying to sort through many biased information sources and end up with a fair and accurate story... they know how to deal with the information they receive, what to use and what to leave behind. That’s what quality journalism is all about. That’s the role of a gatekeeper... But if certain news stories can rise to prominence because of manipulation by PR or other agencies — then the important role of the journalist, as society’s gatekeeper, becomes seriously compromised."

So journalists are 'gatekeepers', eh? A rather interesting public admission of what many of my former colleagues and current acquaintances generally keep amongst themselves.

However, their profession would actually be a lot more 'quality' if they weren't gatekeepers. It would mean, for example, that the international 'Climategate' scandal of falsified data by climate scientists in the UK and US (a story that broke in December) might actually be reported in Australia rather than being the subject of a virtual news blackout in that country due to their mainstream media's political bias.

In fact, in advocating the role of journalist as gatekeeper, what you're cheering on is exactly what is killing the old media, causing newspaper revenues to fall and jobs to be lost daily - it is that people have learned to get their information from a wider variety of sources on the internet and then sort that information through the filters of their own biases. And that's human nature too.

Playing Chicken

Everyone's favourite political advocate Sam Kekovich goes to air with his new advertisement:



Now Sam's being 'lamb-asted' (tee, hee) by vegetarian rival Frys:



Unfortunately not as funny as Sam and it goes on waaaay too long, thus losing its effectiveness as a spoof.

Short is sweet, like this:

Apology, Clarification, Correction...

If one considers the Internet to be the world's biggest library, then it's sometimes worthwhile going over to the 'newspaper' section.

Perhaps, more specifically, the newspaper corrections section.

We've all made mistakes, journalists included and those errors can stem from a unseen typo (and now, spellcheckers won't always pick them up), to more serious errors of fact stemming from a misheard quote in an interview or simply plain ignorance.

Most journalists just cross their fingers and hope the error either go unnoticed or unremarked on.

If it doesn't, they also hope that the angry person at the other end of the phone can be placated (who knew there were so many ways of spelling Smith, um Smyth, er Smithe, oops sorry, Smythe)?

The most serious types of errors require an apology, sometimes referred to as 'clarifications' (we personally believe newspapers don't use word 'apology' to avoid legal admissions).

But thanks to the wonders of the Internet, those apologies, corrections, clarifications are forever archived for us to view. Here's our favourite 11 from from web site 11 Points:

The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published Oct. 22. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction. We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any distress caused by our previous apology.

Oops...