I'm OK, you're cute

John Waters has taught me the essential difference between my students and me.

In a Q&A in the June 28, 2010 Globe and Mail the tasteful filmmaker and author of Role Models confesses that he was angry when he made Pink Flamingos. But he ain't angry any more.

"No, no. An angry 60-year-old is an asshole. An angry 20-year-old is cute."

Thanks, John. I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm stuck in a Starbucks lineup.

Or try to decipher the latest traffic signs at the Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport.

Or remember the name of the airport.

CreComm at the World Cup

Creative Communications student Steven Dreger is at the World Cup in South Africa, working on his Independent Professional Project. It's a video about soccer, naturally.

Also naturally, Steve is writing a blog about his experiences.

Check it out. See how he became a soccer fan --and a follower of the German team -- over bratwurst and potato salad at the age of five.

No breasts please, we're Apple

I love the iPad. From a distance, though, and not nearly as fervently as my colleague Kenton Larsen, who has been blogging about his new baby.

Yes, I have run my fingers over Kenton's baby. It's a beautiful device that displays information and connects its users with all sorts of people and things. No doubt the next iterations will be even more beautiful.

But there is a somewhat sinister side to the iPad, as the New York Times reports on June 14, 2010.

According to the NYT, Apple has refused to approve a new comic version of James Joyce's Ulysses as an iPad app until the authors remove a panel that shows a woman with exposed breasts.

That's 77 years after a U.S. judge ruled that Joyce's book is not obscene, opening the door to its wide distribution.

OK, breasts begone, say the authors, although they say they argued with Apple for a while.

What's sinister about that? Just that these authors see the iPad as so appealing and Apple so powerful that they are willing to make their material conform to the company's inscrutable standards of taste.

I hope nobody -- oh, let's say R. Crumb -- tries to create an app for a comic version of the Book of Genesis. I hear Eve is naked in that one.

80 fact checkers, one magazine

In my Editing Print and Online Media class I challenge students to Spot the Screwup. They find lots of errors online, in dead-tree newspapers and magazines, even printed on the walls of buildings.

Presumably all that material went through an editing process of some kind. Readers don't know what errors were fixed before publication, but we can see the ones that weren't.

Fixing mistakes -- and doing all the other useful things that editors do, such as checking context and tone -- is time-consuming and expensive.

For example, the German magazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror) employs 80 fact-checkers, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

But some facts are more equal than others, or at least they used to be.

A long comment attached to the CJR article by sociologist and journalist Hersch Fischler highlights the historic role of Der Spiegel fact checkers in digging up dirt on the magazine's political enemies.

Bloggers = journalists = PR and ad people

An article in the June 1, 2010 issue of The Uniter, Winnipeg's Weekly Urban Journal, allows a mainstream journalist to perpetuate a misconception about bloggers.

The article quotes Geoff Kirbyson, a Winnipeg Free Press reporter, criticizing bloggers as inferior to writers of his ilk.

“Journalists went to school and studied the craft. Bloggers are not trained,” he said. “They don’t do the work or attend events. They just comment on what they’ve read. If they started showing up at things and doing the work, then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. A lot of blogging is second-hand reporting.”

But bloggers actually are trained.

All Creative Communications students at Red River College are required to blog weekly. Instructors guide their efforts and grade them. Instructors blog, too.

CreComm instructors and students understand that being able to blog and to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter effectively are essential skills for our graduates, whether they specialize in advertising, journalism, media production or public relations. A recent survey of employers in our fields endorses this view.

And it's not just college instructors who are promoting blogging. Policy Frog on June 1, 2010 comments on Kirbyson's statement and argues persuasively for the validity of blogging as a journalistic tool.

Babaluk and bug spray: The blog

Creative Communications students don't do all their work in the classroom.

Neil Babaluk's Independent Professional Project, for example, takes him to Manitoba's 77 road-accessible provincial parks.

Check out Babaluk's blog on the Winnipeg Free Press website. More installments all summer long.

OMG! English is taking over the world!

Inspired by the blogs of the students in my Intersession course (links at right of this screen), I am providing a list of resources for anyone interested in editing for print or online media.

How online media are helping the English language conquer the world: an excerpt from Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language by Robert McCrum, and a New York Times review of the book.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/books/excerpt-globish.html?emc=eta1

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/books/26book.html?emc=eta1

Numbers are our friends! Especially percentages and percentage points.

Here are two explanations.

http://www.mathsisfun.com/percentage-points.html

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/64433.html

Purdue University’s OWL provides many useful resources dealing with writing and editing.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/1/

Check out the section on logic.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/659/01/

These points on logic are particularly useful when editing advertising and public relations material -- and, of course, journalism.