Bruce the Blog

 I have a few built-in thermostats I reflexively use to take the temperature of periodicals in the course of determining the caliber of journalists at the helm.

1) Dates: They are most correctly and cleanly written as on the folio of a periodical or on a calendar, which is to say Feb. 9, 2010. Inexplicably, even the same publications that present dates the correct way on their cover or on the folio of each page are prone to clumsily present the date inside their pages as Feb. 9th, 2010. That’s the way it’s said, not written. The culprits surprisingly include Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. In the latter case, its chief editor is a trained reporter, which rarely implies a comparable skill in editing. Both periodicals are at a far remove from the height of their previous powers as among the most revered and cleanly edited consumer periodicals, as reflected by their flouting of the most standard, obvious style conventions.

2) State abbreviations: In journalism, the abbreviation for California is Calif., not CA, which, like every other two-letter state abbreviation, is a postal code used in the context of street addresses, not a textual abbreviation. Journalists with a sense of style and dedication to the details of their craft know that; other journalists are just lazy and don’t care, so they moonlight during their day job as mail carriers.

3) Advertorial: It’s not only because this non-word is reviled by the American Society of Magazine Editors that I make it known to all staffs I’ve ever run that I don’t want to hear or see the oxymoronic term appear on anything I publish or used in conversation with advertisers. My rationale is rooted in the most simple logic and respect for language and our audience: Everything that appears on the printed page can be classified as one of two things: if it’s placed by the pub’s staff, it’s editorial: if it’s paid for by someone else, it’s advertising. The duplicitous purpose of the neologism advertorial is to confuse and mislead people into thinking the content so labeled is either neither editorial or advertising or is both editorial and advertising. Either way, there’s no such thing.

4)  This is the latest litmus test that separates the pros from the shmos. It’s not everyday you see any business fairly bragging about violating a federal regulation. Yet that’s just what free periodicals that list U.S. Post Offices among their distribution locations are doing. The pros know it’s against U.S. postal code for periodicals to be displayed for distribution inside a post office. You can’t blame the shmos for not knowing any better.