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June 21, 2010

Jodee Taylor: Americans' geography

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The tweet came across on a regular Monday afternoon:

"On May 17, AP will restore country names in references to Bogota, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kabul, Oslo."

I mentally quizzed myself: Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Germany, Afghanistan, Norway.

Ding! One hundred percent.

Minutes later, another tweet:

"On May 17, AP will restore the province name, Ontario, for Ottawa in Canada."

Wait a minute. What's going on?

The Associated Press, the style guru for newspapers everywhere, including this one, doesn't make changes lightly. A month earlier, they'd buckled under enormous pressure (I sent at least three tweets myself!) and changed "Web site" to "website."

The "style" we use isn't just grammar- and spelling-type things. Style covers a range of spelling, punctuation, capitalization and other vagaries that we try to keep consistent. We don't want to write "Kmart" on Tuesday and "K-mart" on Wednesday, for instance. We want to stay consistent on how we abbreviate "Maine" every time we write it. (Psych! We don't abbreviate "Maine.") And we certainly don't want to spell out "Avenue" when we really should be writing "Ave." (but only with an address).

The stylebook gets updated every year (the 2010 edition just came out; do you have it yet?) and the changes that are made between publication dates are tweeted and added to the online stylebook.

But truthfully, not too many people care.

There's a serious pocket of copy editors who live and breathe AP style (they announced the "website" change at a copy editor conference and the crowd went nuts), and it's recommended that reporters learn it too, just so the copy editors don't hate on them. But other than that, it's hard to imagine anyone getting very excited.

But the changes in country names struck me as a step backward. Are Americans dumbing down? Do we need country names now where earlier it went without saying? And the capital of Canada? We have to include its province or nobody will know which "Ottawa" we're talking about?

I admit, I sent a kind of snotty tweet back to the AP: "What's going on? Are we, as Americans, getting dumber and we have to be reminded what country/province major cities are in?"

Then I felt bad when they put it on the "Ask the Editors" list that week and tweeted about it again: "Wondering why AP is restoring country names to some non-U.S. cities?"

But the answer pretty much backed me up: "The changes were based on editors' judgment that some international cities get higher reader recognition when paired with their countries in news stories."

So yeah, it turns out we do need to see the country names to know where in the world these major cities are. Or we could pay attention to places outside our borders.

Jodee Taylor can be reached at jtaylor@record-eagle.com.

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