Tagged: Doug MacKay
The pun addiction of newscasters
Peter Barss thinks newscasters overuse puns. In a letter to CTV, he wrote:
Like many news stations (radio and television) you seem inclined to use as many puns as you can fit into a story. The question I’d like to suggest that you ask yourselves is, “Why?”
Does a pun help to elucidate a story? I don’t think so. In fact, the use–overuse actually–of puns acts as a distraction from the news. Instead of helping to clarify a story, puns draw attention to the “cleverness” of the speaker. It’s like “Hey, look at me. I just found another pun.” Just because a pun can be made does not mean that it should be made.
Another thing to keep in mind is that puns are generally defined as a “humorous” play on words.
A couple of nights ago Jacqueline Foster was describing the incident in Mexico when a woman was badly beaten in an elevator.
Quoting a relative Foster said, “Prosser (the woman’s uncle) says every bone in her face was broken.” And then Foster added, ” The family also shattered…”
Clever? No. Humorous? Nope.
I don’t think it was Peter’s intent to single out Foster or CTV, since, as he points out, many newscasters are equally guilty. The habit is less irritating when it occurs in the banter among co-hosts, but puns, like alliteration, should be used sparingly in the news.
There are times, however, when puns are irresistible. Doug MacKay, former editor of the late lamented Halifax Daily News (celebrating its fourth deathaversary this weekend) recalls one from his days out west:
At the Winnipeg Free Press in the 1970s, there was a rough and ready sports deskman named Dallis Beck. Harold Ballard, the controversial owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, was on trial for his financial shenanigans. On the wintry day after Ballard testified in his own defence, Beck headed the story: “Hark, the angel Harold sings.”
At the risk of undercutting Peter’s point, with which I wholeheartedly agree, I’ll note that MacKay’s yarn appears in a roundup of news puns, intentional and otherwise, compiled by the late Charles Stough of the Burned Out Newspapercreatures Guild listserv, aka BONG. [Archive link, anyone?]
[Disclosure: Barss was once my brother-in-law and remains my pal; MacKay was never a relative but is always a pal.]
Shirky: Complexity goeth before a fall
Complex systems, writes Clay Shirky, have a habit of collapsing catastrophically, and that, he says, is the best way to understand what’s happened to big media since the arrival of the Internet.
About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.
To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
Remember that next time you hear the Chronicle-Herald’s Dan Leger fulminate over the Internet “thievery” he blames for all that newspaper’s woes. Shirky urges media barons to consider this inconvenient fact:
The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!) That minute has been watched by more people than the viewership of American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and the Superbowl combined. (174 million views and counting.)
Some video still has to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old media ecoystem, where video had to be complex simply to be video, is broken. Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete with cheap bits made in simple ways. “Charlie Bit My Finger” was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.
174, 604,802 to be exact. Holy doodle!
Hat tip: Doug MacKay.
Rosie – a postscript (updated)
Doug MacKay, who edited the Halifax Daily News in its heyday, writes from Toronto:
I am sorry to read that Rosie passed away. From the moment she peed on the editor’s carpet, I knew she and her owner were of like mind. A great companion.
For the record, Rosie only ever peed on the editor’s carpet once, and at a young age. It is acknowledged, however, that the stain never came out, and may have played a role in Transcontinental’s subsequent decision to abandon the Burnside location.
UPDATE: What is it with beagles and journalists? James Cobb, Automobiles Editor of the New York Times, writes:
We lost our own eternally voracious beagle, Chad, more than two years ago. I still cannot open the squeaky pantry door, where the treats were (and are) kept, without expecting him to materialize with hungry eyes and pleading tail. He managed to hear the faint sound wherever on the property he was, no matter the activity he had been engaged in.
Chad looked remarkably like your Rosie, and we miss him terribly. My heartfelt condolences.
