Outsourcing

For this week’s blog entry I decided to Google “copy editing” and see what I could find. I ended up finding an article in “Business Week” from July 8, 2008 called “Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India.”

It was actually a really interesting article, mostly about a company called Mindworks. This is a company that is located in India and has been around for four years. Mindworks is a company that does outsourcing for newspapers and other publications in the U.S. and Europe. However, they have only been editing for American papers for this past year. The article states that they do work that journalists and copyeditors usually do.

I did not know until relatively recently that some papers outsourced their copyediting and other jobs to other countries. And I am not sure how I feel about this.

First of all, sending these jobs to other countries is creating less jobs here for American citizens to have. In addition, people in other countries have other ways to talking and probably ways to edit things. Therefore, I feel that when editing is done in another country, they might fix or change something in a way that we would not read over here. Even though they would have certain rules and learn how we edit and read here, I feel that there are some things that could still potentially be overlooked.

However, the article states that “Mindworks claims that it helps publications cut costs 35% to 40%.” So I suppose that if this is true then there are some positives to outsourcing copy editing. Because since the newspaper industry continues to struggle every year with work being moved to the internet and just having high costs of being in business saving money wherever they can is beneficial.

However, as I continued to read the article, I came across the part about how the people in India go about copyediting. And they say that they never actually contact the reporter. I just think this is a little bit ridiculous. I feel that if the copyeditor needs clarifying or needs to discuss something about the story then the first person they should talk to is the person who actually wrote the story. However, Mindworks states that they do not. I feel that if the person editing doesn’t talk to the reporter when they need clarification then they could end up changing the story to mean something else. I think that this system could just lead to potential problems and some libel issues.

After reading and re-reading this article I still do not know where I stand on the issue of outsourcing journalism and copyediting. I agree that there are both positives and negatives to this. So I guess that only time will show if this is actually good or bad based on what happens while outsourcing.

Plagiarism is horrible.

At first I was having trouble deciding what to write about for this week’s blog entry. So I decided to instead work on my speech for Communication 321 class – Persuasive Speaking. For our first round of speeches we’re giving statement of fact speeches. I chose to do the topic of obesity in America, specifically to children. So I spent almost two hours doing research and finding good articles to support this statement. Then I started to plan out my speech. But I wasn’t entirely sure what my teacher wanted the outline to look like, so to make sure I went to his website and checked his sample for the first round of speeches. And what do you know, but the sample was on childhood obesity. And the research that I had found was almost identical to what his sample was. So after all that work I did, I had to start over because I did not want my teacher to think I had cheated and copied his example.

So this experience I had reminded me of last week’s lecture topic on plagiarism. And it made me think that I have no idea how those men could plagiarize their stories. Just knowing that I had the same topic as my teacher’s sample made me freak out that I would get in trouble. So, I just do not understand how these men could live with themselves knowing what they did and on purpose.

I then decided to do a Google search on “journalism and plagiarism” and I found an interesting article by the Poynter Institute.

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=70511

I especially thought that his advice was good about what an editor is supposed to do to make sure that people do not plagiarize. I thought number 9 – 12 were great. They all say to pray. And although this may seem a little ridiculous, I think it is true. Because an editor can only do so much to catch and try to prevent plagiarism and then the rest is up to the reporters to do the right thing.

I just wish that people were more honest and didn’t steal other people’s work. Because it’s just a lie and I don’t see how people who do take others work can live with themselves and continuously do it over and over.

This also made me think about the issue of which is worse fakes or plagiarizing something. And I still am not sure because I think both are horrible. However, I think if I have to make a decision then I would say that plagiarism is worse. I think because it is truly stealing and that is first of all legally wrong. While faking something, is just creating new ideas and is not necessarily against the law. I also think that plagiarizing is morally wrong and people should just not take other people's ideas, use them for their own, and then benefit from those stolen ideas.

In addition, I also think it is ridiculous how people like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass are making a lot of money based on their stories which have been turned into movies. However, I think it is good that what they did has been revealed and they are being made examples for what not to do: plagiarize. People really should learn from their mistakes and not repeat them by making things up and pretending to report on them.

William Safire's On Language columns

For this week’s blog assignment I read a website from the New York Times. It is called “William Safire’s On Language columns.” (the website is http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/magazine/columns/on_language/index.html?qu&scp=1-spot&sq=on+language&st=nyt)

This website basically just has links to the columns that William Safire writes for the New York Times.

Each column is about language, how it is used in a certain case and what it means in that instance. I found some of the articles to be interesting, but to be honest I thought that some were confusing because I was unsure of exactly what he was talking about.

However, there were some that I found interesting. For instance, I enjoyed “Haircut.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11wwln-safire-t.html) It starts off by explaining how the Detroit News has a headline called “Haircut Politics Bad for Big Three” and The Asia Sentinel in Hong Kong has a headline called “Asia’s Top Tycoons Take a Haircut.”

The article then goes on to talk about how he thinks “haircut” was started as a metaphor. Safire says it is “probably based on the weakening effect of the biblical Delilah’s shearing of Samson’s invigorating mane.”

Next he talks about how “haircut” currently can mean “a sudden loss of equity or drop in income.” I think this is very interesting because usually when you think of a haircut, in its traditional meaning you would not think of it as a bad thing, however, these newspapers are using it in their headlines with a negative connotation.

Another column I thought was interesting was called “Metaphor Mix.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/magazine/26wwln-safire-t.html) The part I liked the best was: “In the second presidential debate, Barack Obama said, ‘Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears.’ Obama apparently confused one century-old metaphor, green around the gills, meaning ‘nauseated,’ with another, wet behind the ears, meaning ‘immature, gullible.’”

I think that it is funny this phrase was used wrong. They are both very unusual metaphoric phrase to use, I think. And that is why I think it grabbed my attention because I would not have caught it or known what it meant has it not been explained to me.

I read some of the other articles William Safire read however I did not find many others that I really enjoyed or that really made sense entirely.

I think that this website is good for people who are interesting in language and what words mean when they are used in certain places. However, I think it was less helpful and more just informational and interesting.

first entry

So as I started to think about what I would write about for my first entry for Jour 420 about news editing I realized I had no idea what to say.

So I decided to just Google “news editing” and see what it came up with. The first search result that came back was from Wikipedia so I clicked on it to see if it would give me an idea about what to blog about. Luckily it did.

(this is the website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editing)

Now I realize that Wikipedia is not the most credible source because it is written by average people and anyone can make corrections. Therefore, mistakes can occur in the information. However, I think that it is interesting that the entry on “editing” has grammar mistakes in it. I would have thought that someone who was writing the entry on “editing” would be able to actually edit his or her work and make sure there are no mistakes.

(so hopefully all the following mistakes I found are actually mistakes)

In the first paragraph I found some comma mistakes.

The first sentence says “Editing is the process of preparing languagem images, soundsm video, or film through correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications in various media.”

From what I learned in class last week I thought in a series you do not put a comma before the “and” or “or.” However, there are two commas misused in the above sentence for that reason.

This comma when in a series mistake occurs several times throughout the entry. However, there are some sentences when there is not a comma before an “and” which is correct.

I just would have thought the person writing this entry would at least be consistent with his or her comma usage. But apparently they are not.

Later in the entry this sentence appears, “In the book publishing industry, editors organize anthologies and other compilations, produce definitive editions of a classic author's works ("scholarly editor"); and organize and manage contributions to a multi-author book (symposium editor or volume editor).

I think that the first comma used after “industry” should not be there. I do not see any reason for there to be one. I also believe that the semicolon used is wrong. There this no reason why there should be any punctuation there, let alone a semicolon.

I think it is just a little ironic that the person writing an entry on “editing” did not edit his or her work that closely.