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monsoon

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I have noticed, as I am sure that we all have, that journalism is definitely getting a lot less formal lately. In some forms (such as this forum) being less formal is very appropriate. In other ways, our major news outlets are being less formal, and I can't but help to see this as being not very good. We go to school and we are supposed to learn how to write correctly, and yet we are evolving into this society where not being formal is the thing to do ALL the time now. Does anyone see the same thing as I do? I dam sure this issue is one part of many reasons that the newspapers in this nation are failing. How big of an issue is it that we can just get our news from Charlotte.com for free rather than paying have the paper delivered to hour house? I think it's a big issue.....I honestly don't think that online news from local papers will be free in the long-term.

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There are some posters on UP who bring to mind the word 'illiterate'. Well, really just one that I can think of off the top of my head. It annoys me, but I figure what the heck, they have as much right to express their views and make their contributions as the next guy who knows how to punctuate, capitalize and spell correctly.

But when the newspaper 'journalists' drop down to slang, incorrect punctuation and spelling, and wrong context (ie, effect vs. affect; I see this all the time), I get extremely irritated. There is not much I can do about it, but it is frustrating.

Which is the cause and which is the effect? Are the newspapers going down because of bad writing or are they having difficulty getting good writers because they can't afford to pay them well? This is not to say all of the writers are bad, but I definitely feel that it has gone downhill in the last few years.

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If someone wants to discard my entire body of work for such a simple slip-up, all I can say is "let me show you the door." Or the close button, as it were. That kind of logic is not representative of any critical thinking skills, the kind of skills that separate us from the aforementioned 15-year-olds.

Do you stop in spoken conversation every time you make a simple error to go back and correct yourself? Not if you want to actually get anywhere. Just because I'm transcribing my thoughts into text doesn't mean it has to be in an official, professional capacity. Written text does not equal formal academic style by default. There is a full spectrum of communications types, all of which have merit.

Besides, I haven't seen a single post in here since mine that is completely free of grammar and style errors, yours included. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

I've probably had some 200,000 conversations in life, and from that experience I can tell you that people appreciate not getting the structure of their words dissected when the meaning was clearly received. How do you think language evolves anyway? Through experimentation, error, simplification.

It all comes down to the fact that we're all just talking to each other in here. Despite claims of formality and professionalism, this is, in the end, an online forum. There are freaking emoticons below my text box right now. One of them is about to barf.

Yes, I made an elementary grammatical "mistake". But I'll almost certainly make one again, I've probably already done it in this reply. It's hilarious, I'm sure, because we're discussing the nature of journalism, and how me and the gang at CLT Blog are supposedly riding in on white horses. Believe me I appreciate the irony. But I wasn't submitting my response earlier as any kind of formal thesis.

In all honesty, your response to me comes off less as professional critique in a professional setting, and more as abrasive and unnecessarily judgmental posturing. I just don't see the point in any of this, and am more than a little ashamed I'm taking this so personally.

I think you're missing the point. While people on a discussion forum regularly use incorrect style, grammar, and spelling, we're not holding ourselves out as the "community watchdogs" as most journalistic endeavors do. I assume that's what your project is. That's the whole purpose of a well run and well disciplined local press, to inform its citizens of what's going on in the community. At least, that's what it used to be.

In my opinion, how can you hold city council, or the police chief, or the local school board accountable, when you can't even spell a word like accounteble? Your credibility drops to zero. Discussion boards and blogs will never ever fill that roll sufficiently enough.

While I've noticed discussions here (in the Grand Rapids section) have gotten noticed in the local community, they really only pick up steam and cause people to act when the local "traditional" media climbs on board. And actually, it works vice versa as well. People on the forum seem to take things more seriously if it has been covered by the local media.

But seriously, coming on here and spitting and throwing punches might tip possible investors off to the potential seriousness and maturity level of your venture. Are you going to allow public comment in your new business model? If so, you're going to catch a lot more of a s**t-storm there than you'll ever see here. You'll look back at your little grammatical gaff, and one or two people pointing it out in constructive criticism, as the good old days.

But if you are serious, you may want to talk to the Knight Foundation (if you haven't already), which is granting funds to communities to open up Neighborhood News Bureaus. There may be one starting in Charlotte (I don't know), to which the end goal is to have people take these fledgling bureaus into profitable journalistic businesses. A lot of people see it as the future of local journalism, as the big kahunas continue to drastically cut.

BTW: that WebsiteOutlook site that someone linked to is hilarious. Not all online media outlets charge per click or per 1000 impressions for sponsorships and advertising, which is what they are assuming (I assume).

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I think you're missing the point. While people on a discussion forum regularly use incorrect style, grammar, and spelling, we're not holding ourselves out as the "community watchdogs" as most journalistic endeavors do. I assume that's what your project is. That's the whole purpose of a well run and well disciplined local press, to inform its citizens of what's going on in the community. At least, that's what it used to be.

In my opinion, how can you hold city council, or the police chief, or the local school board accountable, when you can't even spell a word like accounteble? Your credibility drops to zero. Discussion boards and blogs will never ever fill that roll sufficiently enough.

(...)

But seriously, coming on here and spitting and throwing punches might tip possible investors off to the potential seriousness and maturity level of your venture. Are you going to allow public comment in your new business model? If so, you're going to catch a lot more of a s**t-storm there than you'll ever see here. You'll look back at your little grammatical gaff, and one or two people pointing it out in constructive criticism, as the good old days.

Thanks for the feedback GRD. I definitely don't think I'm missing your point: that a person such as myself -- if I (and CLT Blog) are claiming to be what we are -- should set and maintain a professional example.

I think on the whole, you'll find that we do maintain that example. Or at least we try our hardest. We are, after all, citizen journalists, and are operating with very tight resources and what seems like never enough time in the day.

I think a big difference between us and people at a major news outlet is that we actually participate in forums like Urban Planet (I mean why wouldn't we?), and when we do so we'll be honest about who we really are. It's transparency, it's honesty, it's appreciation for where the real conversation is happening about the city -- but it also opens us up to attack. There are more than a few "real journalists" in here that just don't make public who they are, and have made their share of mistakes along the way. It's just a different strategy to online communication that I don't resonate with.

I'm sure a lot of us are very busy. Myself: I take classes at UNC Charlotte, do freelance web consulting to pay the bills, and spend an inordinate amount of time curating and growing CLT Blog, because it's something I'm passionate about. It leaves me very little time for things like, you know, sleep. If I have to choose between not participating in forums like this at all, or simply dropping in whenever I can and putting my thoughts out, of course I will choose the latter.

And I welcome criticism with open arms, seriously. When I posted the I/Me slip-up earlier and saw some of the responses, I thought it was hilarious and the critique well-deserved. If the tables had been turned I would have been there too, giving the guy like me a hard time. But that's where it stops. To tear down a person's overall ability on the basis of something so trivial: that's what motivates me to defend myself. This is a parallel pattern of thought to the kind of miserable judgement tabloids administer to actors and musicians.

Pick up the Sunday paper tomorrow. You'll find errors there too, and they have a full time editing staff. Written correspondence will never be perfect, even when we try our best. But I don't use that as my basis for criticizing them, because on the whole everything they write is very properly executed. And there are plenty other areas to criticize them in that make for a more interesting debate anyway.

But if you are serious, you may want to talk to the Knight Foundation (if you haven't already), which is granting funds to communities to open up Neighborhood News Bureaus. There may be one starting in Charlotte (I don't know), to which the end goal is to have people take these fledgling bureaus into profitable journalistic businesses. A lot of people see it as the future of local journalism, as the big kahunas continue to drastically cut.

Yep, we're seeking funding from a variety of channels that pass through the Knight Foundation right now. I'll have another look at the Neighborhood News Bureau initiatives though, thanks for the tip.

We're trying to be a public-facing outlet for citizen members of the community to share local news. We help them with editing, photography, etc. to produce content of a higher quality than perhaps they would do on their own. It's taking more of a distillery approach to media than a manufacturing one. And I think this kind of approach is key to the survival of quality local journalism.

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Which is the cause and which is the effect? Are the newspapers going down because of bad writing or are they having difficulty getting good writers because they can't afford to pay them well? This is not to say all of the writers are bad, but I definitely feel that it has gone downhill in the last few years.

Yeah, it's definitely a chicken and the egg. As ad sales plummet, so does newspaper staff, and so does, unfortunately, the quality of their output. There's still plenty of quality journalism to be found these days though, it's just popping up in new places we aren't used to looking.

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But seriously, coming on here and spitting and throwing punches might tip possible investors off to the potential seriousness and maturity level of your venture. Are you going to allow public comment in your new business model? If so, you're going to catch a lot more of a s**t-storm there than you'll ever see here. You'll look back at your little grammatical gaff, and one or two people pointing it out in constructive criticism, as the good old days.

Oh, I meant to respond to this too.

Yes, in time we're definitely going to be very open about all our plans. And I can't wait for all the criticism, it's a big part of why we want to be transparent in the first place. I've felt the s**t-storm before in many a previous online venture and it's a valuable part of the process.

I hope that investors reading this would appreciate my passion for what everyone at CLT Blog is doing, my innate inability to sit back while we take heat that I think is unjustified, and my willingness to address complaints on a one-on-one basis. The investors and industry mentors we've been talking to so far, at least, do. I'm sure I could employ more tact here and there, we all could. But again, I'd rather get it out in one form or another, than not at all.

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One thing that jumped out at me on this thread was the Observer shutting down its business section. How is that in a city of Charlotte's size? Is there a business journal in Charlotte that gets the majority of readership? Or are a lot of Charlotte-ons (not meant disparagingly) getting their business news from a global perspective (WSJ, NYTimes, etc.), and don't care so much about local business news?

Interesting times we are in. I'm afraid younger generations, unless they are students of communication or journalism, don't fully appreciate how important a free and disciplined press is to our democracy. It cannot be replaced by boards and the blogosphere. I may be a bit hard on young people, but not a lot of young people seem concerned that media outlets are going out of business.

As much as we can find fault in news outlets and news coverage sometimes, having competent and "embedded" journalists in our communities and in Washington D.C. helps keep fascism and corporate abuse in check. Scandals and abuse seem to be rampant right now, dominating the headlines. Imagine if no one were demanding transparency and asking the tough questions. We'd be toast. And frankly, most Americans don't understand the tough issues well enough to get beyond the PR spin-meister's version of events.

Maybe the Charlotte Observer has become a rag, but hopefully it means that citizen journalists are ready to step up and sit in on boring court proceedings and boring city commission meetings, and have enough journalistic sense to read between the lines and report back to the populace what is really going on.

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One thing that jumped out at me on this thread was the Observer shutting down its business section. How is that in a city of Charlotte's size? Is there a business journal in Charlotte that gets the majority of readership? Or are a lot of Charlotte-ons (not meant disparagingly) getting their business news from a global perspective (WSJ, NYTimes, etc.), and don't care so much about local business news?

Was it actually stated by the O that they are shutting down their business section? I know it was reported here, but I didn't see anything come from them. Maybe I just missed it.

I agree, eliminating it is nuts. Not that there are that many great stories, but at least it's there.

I haven't seen the point of the stock listings for quite a few years now, though. It's hard to believe that someone invested in the stock market is going to wait until the next day to check their stock prices in the newspaper. Not in today's instantaneous information age, when you can stream stock prices onto your computer desktop or phone.

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....But that's where it stops. To tear down a person's overall ability on the basis of something so trivial: that's what motivates me to defend myself. This is a parallel pattern of thought to the kind of miserable judgement tabloids administer to actors and musicians.....
As GRDadof3 said, you completely misunderstood the purpose of my post. If you wish to make posts that are unprofessional looking that is your business as I don't really care. Is I said in the post, it was meant as advice you didn't ask for and not anything to do with forum moderation. I really wish now that I had not have wasted the time I spent on it. I stand by what I said and it was only offered since you came here and posted that your blog was some sort of alternative to the Observer. However, given what you posted above in response, don't expect to see me there. I don't care to be involved in the kind of drama that you gave in what you call a defense. As much as you claim otherwise you do not welcome criticism with open arms and have responded IMO, with personal details of your life in a topic that is supposed to be about the Observer.

This topic is about the Observer so you have spoken your piece about your blog. I welcome you to discuss the Observer if you like. Please don't post about your situation again as it is off-topic. Feel free to PM if you need to discuss further.

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As GRDadof3 said, you completely misunderstood the purpose of my post. If you wish to make posts that are unprofessional looking that is your business as I don't really care. Is I said in the post, it was meant as advice you didn't ask for and not anything to do with forum moderation. I really wish now that I had not have wasted the time I spent on it. I stand by what I said and it was only offered since you came here and posted that your blog was some sort of alternative to the Observer. However, given what you posted above in response, don't expect to see me there. I don't care to be involved in the kind of drama that you gave in what you call a defense. As much as you claim otherwise you do not welcome criticism with open arms and have responded IMO, with personal details of your life in a topic that is supposed to be about the Observer.

This topic is about the Observer so you have spoken your piece about your blog. I welcome you to discuss the Observer if you like. Please don't post about your situation again as it is off-topic. Feel free to PM if you need to discuss further.

And so the conversation ends. I appreciate your caring enough to offer an opinion.

Was it actually stated by the O that they are shutting down their business section? I know it was reported here, but I didn't see anything come from them. Maybe I just missed it.

I agree, eliminating it is nuts. Not that there are that many great stories, but at least it's there.

I haven't seen the point of the stock listings for quite a few years now, though. It's hard to believe that someone invested in the stock market is going to wait until the next day to check their stock prices in the newspaper. Not in today's instantaneous information age, when you can stream stock prices onto your computer desktop or phone.

I'm sure their logic, if this is true, is that the Charlotte Business Journal is not worth competing with. I'm not saying it's good logic, it is what it is.

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While The O has serious flaws I would argue that it still occupies an institutional niche in our city's landscape. I have issues with how they handle different aspects of newsgathering. However, when a big story comes along or there is an update on a development project the O is my go to default source. There is some gravitas left behind their name because their information is vetted by professional reporters and editors. Along with the inherent flaws in their staff which comes with being human. All papers of various prestige levels have a corrections page.

Forms of information like CLT Blog may be our future but it will take time for them gain the ingrained credibility that the Observer has for simply being a "newspaper".

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  • 3 weeks later...

Am I missing something here...?

The U.S. Department of Transportation announces the largest shot in the arm to High Speed passenger rail transit EVER with Charlotte being the initial terminus for a D.C. to New Orleans line and what will probably be in the first tier of funding, and absolutely no mention of it in this morning's Charlotte Observer..

Not on the Front page, Not on the Editorial page, Not buried in Section A, Not in the Business Section, Not in the Local Section, and Not even on the Comics page..

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Am I missing something here...?

The U.S. Department of Transportation announces the largest shot in the arm to High Speed passenger rail transit EVER with Charlotte being the initial terminus for a D.C. to New Orleans line and what will probably be in the first tier of funding, and absolutely no mention of it in this morning's Charlotte Observer..

Not on the Front page, Not on the Editorial page, Not buried in Section A, Not in the Business Section, Not in the Local Section, and Not even on the Comics page..

Where did you hear that Charlotte would be in the first tier of funding? :huh: I read the Obama press conference regarding high speed rail, but didn't see any mention of what high-speed rail sectors would be getting funding.

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Am I missing something here...?

The U.S. Department of Transportation announces the largest shot in the arm to High Speed passenger rail transit EVER with Charlotte being the initial terminus for a D.C. to New Orleans line and what will probably be in the first tier of funding, and absolutely no mention of it in this morning's Charlotte Observer..

Not on the Front page, Not on the Editorial page, Not buried in Section A, Not in the Business Section, Not in the Local Section, and Not even on the Comics page..

The online O has two articles about this - actually from the Raleigh N & O, but I don't understand why they didn't print anything...? I read the online version of the article at about 6pm yesterday - it's not like it was too late to run in print...

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I get the weekend 'O'. This morning it came with the Wall St. Journal Weekend Edition! I guess a mess-up at the printer.

It was hard to read, though, the type is so much smaller than the O and the pages are. . . filled up! :shok:

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  • 1 month later...

I've noticed that recently the Observer has quietly gotten rid of the online PDF of its printed edition. Often it was less juvenile than the on-line version published these days. I wonder if this is the next step to completely eliminating the printed paper? It is rather interesting as this isn't the inevitable end for newspapers, but probably is for the bad ones like the Observer. In comparison, the Lake Norman Herald is hiring drivers and advertising to anyone to call to get a free delivery box for their printed paper. It can be done. However it requires the production of something that people actually want to read.

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^Actually I saw this when I decided to make this post. I am careful to check because people will roast me for making a mistake. When I clicked on it, it didn't work. Maybe it was incompetent website work given that they have put all of this in India now. On the other hand, why take it off the main page? IMO, the Observer is moving towards getting rid of the print edition. They have completely failed at their "value engineering" and now have no other choice.

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Your response doesn't make much sense. The link is still on the main page...they just moved it to a different spot on the page. The url of the actual page that holds the Printed Paper content has not changed. The link has always worked for me...even after they moved the link.

But yes I think the Observer will be moving away from a Printed Paper because that reflects how people are reading it...more and more online and less in the actual physical paper.

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  • 1 month later...

I thought I'd point out that The O, and the CBJ ran the same basic story - with two totally opposite spins:

From the O:

Posted: Tuesday, Jul. 28, 2009

Charlotte-area home prices post solid gain

Charlotte-area home prices posted their best monthly gain in a year in May, based on results of a closely watched home price index released this morning.

From the CBJ:

Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 10:00am EDT

Charlotte-area home prices down 10%

Home prices in the Charlotte market fell 10 percent in May from a year earlier.

Prices rose 0.9 percent in May from April.

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Indeed. Both Rags simply decide to make a useless irrelevant story and then go get some associated useless irrelevant statistics to back up whatever they are claiming. It's not journalism. It's cheap tabloidism and can be done by low cost labor anywhere. They also never explain that Charlotte area means the 3000+ sq mile metro area, which has parts, where prices have been stagnent or falling over the last 10 years. Anson county with declining population is a good example.

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