The Rhetorica Network offers analysis and commentary about the rhetoric, propaganda, and spin of journalism and politics, including analysis of presidential speeches and election campaigns. This site features the Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal web log, comprehensive news media links, a rhetoric textbook, a primer of critical techniques, and information for citizens. The character of Rhetorica represents the purposes and canons of classical rhetoric. --Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D.

Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal

September 29, 2005

Too many cooks?…

Can an open-source site “correct” a badly written (e.g. typos, factual errors) article? A.J. Jacobs has tried to find out. You can check out the action here. Esquire will publish the results.

A good point [emphasis added]:

[Wikipedia Founder Jimmy] Wales pointed to a recent experiment in which The Los Angeles Times tried a “wikitorial” in which its readers could collaboratively work on editorials.

“It was more or less a complete disaster,” Wales said, “because they didn’t have a community built up, so they just had tons and tons of random people (involved). They had to take it down because there was too much vandalism.”

Posted by acline | September 29, 2005 | Posted in: Journalism |

One Response

Sven September 29th, 2005 at 1:56 pm

I was just thinking this morning, somewhat relatedly, about the paradox of the Internet. It’s a venue for individual expression free of the usual editorial “gatekeepers.” But in another sense, writers on the ‘net have exchanged a handful of editors for thousands. Blog readers [ahem] in particular aren’t shy about picking apart sentences like piranha on a wounded tapir [take that, Austin attorney Bill White!].

Closer to the topic at hand, I came across this in an essay about newsroom samizdat:

Written by Thomas Farragher, my colleague at The Boston Globe, it reproduced the Gettysburg Address as if the speech had had to pass through the meat grinder of the Globe’s main copy desk. I’d just had one of my own harrowing experiences with those ferocious editors, and the parody rang true.

Fourscore and seven years ago (can’t we just make it 87 years ago?) our fathers (WHO ARE THEY?? Any mothers???) brought forth on this continent (North America?? Northern Hemisphere??) a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (people, men and women, what???) are created equal. (Why don’t we just say they founded the United States and leave it at that? Pacing’s better.)