Monday, May 9, 2016

New adventures in punctuation and spelling

On 25 April John Drinnan, the NZ Herald’s former media columnist, started a new blog (which shows how much he knows about media). A horrified journalist friend sent me the link to this item about Hilary Barry. It is a beautiful illustration of why God gave journalists sub-editors.
Hype about Hilary leaving MediaWorks is the backdrop to the crisis that led to the exit of Mark Weldon and is very relevant because her resignation brought maters to a head. No doubt “the mate of the nation” has a story to tell on her reasons for leaving, but so far she has not told. Maybe the juicy bits will come out in a woman’s magazine feature in the future. With limited facts media have pulled out woman’s magazine gush.
Maters to a head. Woman’s magazine. Serious new adventures in spelling there.

Wait, there is more:
But if you look at the viewer numbers, you would conclude that Wendy Petrie is much more “:beloved” than Hilary Barry.
A new adventure in punctuation, that “:beloved”. Perhaps it is an emoticon.
I get the Judy Bailey “Mother of the Nation.” thing. From my memory very kiwi tongue-in cheek kiwi kind of way. (Maybe a readers can tell me who first used the line)
Yes, he wrote and published “very kiwi tongue-in cheek kiwi” and “a readers” and couldn’t be arsed putting a full stop at the end of the next sentence.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel. We also get:
with just one months notice
and
Earlier this week one online entertainment reporter this week put hands on hips and declared ” if you don’t love Hilary Barry its because you have not been paying attention.”
The case for sub-editors rests.

So here are REM in 200, live in Wiesbaden, with “So Fast, So Numb” from their 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi:

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is your point that someone on a blog made a spelling mistake? Really? That is your point? Do you feel you contributed to making thw world a better place, or you enhanced someone's day, by writing this?

It's not exactly war crimes, is it.

stephanie said...

Sorry, Anonymous. My take was that everyone, especially media representatives should at least spell-check their blog posts, before hitting 'Send'(or Post). It is, after all, coming out in their name.

In addition, as a non-professional editor, I was highly amused by the lack of understanding of basic grammar and punctuation as well as spelling.

Especially when I read his bio: "John Drinnan has been a business journalist for twenty years, he has been editor of the specialist film and television title "Screen Finance" in London, focussing on the European TV and film industry. He has been writing about media in New Zealand since the deregulation of the television industry in the late 1980s."

Dave Hillier said...

I think Stephen's point was the importance of sub-editors. This stuff is by a writer most of us read when he was at the Herald, and the published columns were impeccable. Seeing what his unedited writing looks like lifts the veil on one of journalism's dirty little secrets: many journalists are terrible writers, and are saved by the subs.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.