Media Critics

Post a Comment

Comment by Roy Cooper on January 17, 2010 at 6:51am

Bob, thank you for having your "Online Editor" contact me. We have tested the system and it now seems to be working as advertised. :)

Comment by Bob Hunter on January 11, 2010 at 10:37am

Roy: e-mail me copies of your posts and I'll check into it. my e-mail is bhunter@mailtribune.com.

Comment by Roy Cooper on January 10, 2010 at 2:15pm

Bob,

Now my second post was deleted. I reviewed the "Community Standards" and my posts are within those standards.

Having posts deleted with no recourse is more than a little frustrating.

Comment by Roy Cooper on January 10, 2010 at 2:11pm

I thought I liked the idea of moderating the forums until my first post was deleted. I think you need to post your criteria for the forums.

Comment by Larry Reavis on January 4, 2010 at 8:07pm

Thanks for the update.......

Comment by Bob Hunter on January 4, 2010 at 5:58pm

Turns out we had a software bug that was turning the forums off. We are manually turning them back on now, and are awaiting a fix on the bug so that it will be automatic.

Comment by Larry Reavis on January 4, 2010 at 11:48am

Just one question, Bob......what happened to the ability of a reader to comment on a news story or letter to the editor? One day it is present, the next it's disappeared......

Comment by Bob Hunter on January 4, 2010 at 10:55am

I agree that we should fix clunky sentences -- and that there should be no typos, fact errors, stories lacking in clarity, etc. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) it's all done by humans, who do make the occasional mistake and who can have a different opinion over what is clunky and what is clear and pithy. We use the computer for spell check, but there is no grammar check available on our system -- from what I've seen of the Word grammar check, it's almost useless, so I'm not sure we're missing much there.
As for the Broder column, they may have changed that on a later version and not sent out a revision on the wire (or we may have missed the resend). We rarely change the columnists' words, unless we find a need to shorten the column for space reasons, so it's highly unlikely anyone locally had a hand in the wording on that column.

Comment by Watch Energy on January 2, 2010 at 6:09pm

Does the Mail Tribune use a computer for copy editing? If so, can it be reprogrammed?

Every day I encounter “clunky” sentences in the MT. Almost all of them result from attempts to avoid placing an adverb between an auxiliary verb and the main verb. These awkward constructions appear in local stories, AP articles, and even the opinion pieces of nationally distributed columnists. They grab my attention because they really throw off the flow of reading -- I have to pause in dealing with the content and work around the grammatical bump in the road. I hardly ever find these glitches in magazine articles and books.

A prime example is the partial sentence “… President Obama likely is to find himself in conflict with the court ...,” from a column by David Broder archived at http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090702/OPINION/307029953/-1/OPINION0105 (end of the third paragraph).

Can you imagine the response of the other panelists if he were to speak those words in a TV discussion? (WHAT did you just say?!) What if instead “… Obama unlikely were to find himself in conflict with the court …”? The funny thing about this example is that it may be attributable to the MT rather than to the author. Broder’s own archive at the Washington Post shows the same sentence in easily readable English (rather than Martian): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/01/AR2009070103024.html Was he shamed into correcting it there, or did some robot on the MT staff “fix” what was originally correct?

My concern about this may seem nit-picky, but I don’t care to see clear writing fouled up by slavish adherence to a “rule” that obscures our sentences. Let’s leave that practice to the legal profession.

Comment by Bob Hunter on November 10, 2009 at 11:27am

At long last I am able to use this forum again. My antiquated browser no longer worked in Rogue Current, but now all is well with IE8. Roy, I hope you saw the other postings and/or stories (Since You Asked) about the forums. Basically, we're waiting for our corporate tech guys to figure it out -- they now say maybe by the end of November, but I'm not planning on it being available until I actually see it.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 7
• Next ›
• Page