JPROF.com celebrates 5th anniversary

JPROF celebrates its fifth anniversary today.

In the past five years the site has grown in size (more than 400), expanded in purpose and reached around the globe to people I never would have touched or heard from.

JPROF was originally conceived (in my small study in Emory, VA, where we were living at the time) as a large, personal filing cabinet for material that I had accumulated during more than 25 years of teaching journalism. The amount of material on the web was expanding exponentially (as it still is), and I also wanted a place to store the things I had found that I might be able to use.

And, because I had several textbooks in print at the time, I wanted a web site that would give users more expanded and up-to-date material.

Since that time, JPROF has also become a forum (particularly through the companion blog http://jprof.blogspot.com for my impressions of what is happpening in the world of journalism and a site for all of the courses that I teach.

Because of JPROF, I have taken on some interesting and exciting projects, particularly this year for Edgenics.com -- something you will hear a great deal about during 2010.

Much has changed in my life during the last five years. I am now on the faculty of the University of Tennesse, having moved from Emory and Henry College in 2006. I am the faculty adviser for the Tennessee Journalist, the students news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, and through it, we have been able to launch a national organization of campus news web sites, the Intercollegiate Online News Network (ICONN). At UT, we have been able to change our curriculum in an interesting and innovative way, and I have the privilege of being in the midst of those changes.

The field of journalism offers many excellent opportunities for our students, and I am happy to still be a part of it.

Personally, 2009 brought Sally and me a move to the farm where she grew up and a new daughter-in-law. Our video review of the year is now on YouTube.

As ever, I am profoundly grateful for the friends I have made through JPROF and for all of the people who have contacted me over the years because what they have found here.

Now, as is my usual custom on this date and because it is New Year's Eve, I bid you: Party on!

Have a great New Year.

(In case you're interested, you can read what we said about JPROF on each of the previous anniversaries on JPROF's About page.)

A new edition of Fowler

Early in my academic writing career, I met Fowler.

I was putting together the first edition of Writing for the Mass Media and was looking for some basic writing references and somehow -- I don't remember how -- came upon Fowler. It was, the parlance of that day, the real thing.

Fowler is an "it," as well as a "he."

He is Henry Fowler. It is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, or as Jim Holt notes in his essay in the New York Times, "among its devotees it is known, reverentially, as 'Fowler.' ”

Holt tells the interesting story of how Fowler became "Fowler." Henry Fowler was a former school teacher and amateur wordsmith who lived on the island of Guernsey with his younger brother Frank. In the first decade of the 20th century, Henry and Frank published a book titled The King's English, which, despite their amateur status, was a great success. They took on the editing of The Concise Oxford Dictionary and then planned a larger book on the language, but World War I occurred. Frank died of tuberculosis, and Henry barely survived a bout of illness, But when he did, he took up the project that he and his brother had envisioned.

As Holt relates in his essay:

The book was published in 1926, to immediate acclaim and brisk sales. Although language, as the truism goes, is an ever changing Heraclitean river, Fowler was not revised until 1965, when Sir Ernest Gowers gave it a light going-over, preserving both the spirit and the substance of the original. (The same cannot be said of the 1996 third edition, heavily reworked by R. W. Burchfield.) Now Oxford University Press has reissued the classic first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ($29.95), with an acute new introduction by the linguist David Crystal. It is a volume that everyone who aspires to a better command of English should possess and consult — sparingly. (emphasis mine)

Sparingly, as Holt points out in the rest of his essay, is the key.

You can't take Fowler too seriously because, for one, Fowler doesn't take himself too seriously. The language should be whatever is useful and not laden with a lot of half-wit rules (such as never splitting an infinitive).

The dictionary isn't a dictionary of definitions but rather a collection of short essays on the language. Most of them are short, thought-provoking, delightful and informative.

Fowler/'Fowler' has been a good friend for a quarter of a century, and it's good to know that there is another edition for the next generation.

An almost new way of organizing news

The way a news organization arranges its content -- news, business, sports, editorial, etc. -- has been a standardized and unquestioned mantra of journalism for many decades.

The front page, or in the digital age the "home page," had a mix of stories and subjects, but each section such as sports had stories that could specifically classified as belonging to that section.

But is this how the readers really want their news?

What if there's a topic you're especially interested in and you want everything a news organization has on that topic in one place? And, if it's breaking news, you want those stories updated the moment new information comes in. And you don't want to wade through a lot of other stuff.

That kind of organization -- one by news topic rather than section heading -- may be on the way. GoogleLabs has teamed up with the Washington Post and New York Times to experiment with something they call Living Story Pages. These pages take a topic and group everything the news organization has about that topic together.

You can see the results of the experiment at this GoogleLabs page.

The Post has three pages, one each on health-care reform, D.C. schools and the Washington Redskins. The Times has five: Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, swine flu and health care. These are topics the news organizations are paying a lot of attention to and to which they are continually generating new information.

This is a departure from the standardized news site organization, but it isn't totally new. Newspapers did this years ago when they would group all of their stories about a big news event together on a page or in a special section.

The news here, however, isn't the idea so much as that fact that the news organizations are working with Google -- not going to war with the search engine behemoth as Rupert Murdoch apparently is determined to do.

And there is yet another departure from the traditional thinking: the Living Story Page mixes news and opinion together. That's a bigger break from the past than most people realize.

Bad news

I am currently working with Edgenics.com to develop a new course curriculum for high school journalism. You will be hearing more about this project as we go along.

Here's a short audio slideshow on the fact that journalists have to tell their audiences "bad news":

Journalists have to tell their audiences bad news. It's not fun or pleasant to do this, but you're going to be a journalist, that's what you have to do.