Latest News

Tale of two cities' designs

When LeBron James took his leave of Cleveland, the Plain Dealer's front page received justified praise from the design world. Charles Apple called it "sheer genius" in his roundup of front pages. SI.com gave the No. 1 spot in its Media Power Rankings for June/July to Emmet Smith, who as the PD's deputy design director for news came up with the idea. Apple, who interviewed the PD design team about their cover, recently moved his blog to the ACES website.

July 19, 2010

Next, maybe monkeys will diagram sentences

If you call someone a grammar monkey, you'll be more right than you know. Research already has shown that monkeys understand some basic grammar principles, such as which words logically follow other words. Now, Harvard scientists have taught 14 cotton-top tamarins to recognize the linguistic principle of suffixes and prefixes.

Aug. 17, 2009

Can spin be spotted with software?

SpinSpotter, which launched this month, claims it can. The company's founders, described in a BusinessWeek article as a mixture of entrepreneurs from the left, right and center, use algorithms to detect "news spin and bias, misuse of sources, and suspect factual support." One blogger, though, is already calling the idea another flavor of "magic beans."

Sept. 9, 2008

Online journalist looks a lot like a copy editor

If you ask online journalists what skills are more important in an online newsroom, what you'll hear are the attributes that largely define a copy editor. C. Max Magee, a graduate student at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, asked exactly that question, and his results have been released by the Online News Association. Top skills: attention to detail, news judgment, grammar, multitasking, dealing with deadlines. As Medill professor Rich Gordon says, "the traditional journalism job that most resembles online newsroom roles is that of copy editor."

Nov. 2, 2006