Year-in-Review Overload
Editors and news directors of the world, please stop the madness. We consumers of mass media can’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV or click on a Web site this week without a year-in-review story. 2007’s Best and Worst Movies! The Top Sports Moments of the Year! A headline on the San Francisco Giants’ Web site reads: “Memories aplenty for Giants in 2007.” (Yes, and they all sucked because the team sucked! I don’t need to see a month-by-month, blow-by-blow account of the team’s worst season in 12 years).
Every section in a newspaper feels a need to do a year-ender. The San Jose Mercury News’ restaurant reviewer even chimes in with “my 10 most memorable meals of the year.” And the Arizona Republic this week felt compelled to remind us that the year’s top local business stories include the lousy housing market and the opening of new shopping centers across the Phoenix metro area. (Why state the obvious? I mean: it’s all still happening and we see it with our own eyes every day. “For Sale” signs litter every neighborhood and houses sit empty for months on end. And, you don’t think we notice that the hundreds of acres of farmland along the freeway are suddenly replaced by a huge Best Buy or Target store?)
At least some enterprising publications are not just regurgitating old news and are trying to put a new spin in their stories. But they, too, have varying degrees of success. Read more
Art of the Interview
My San Francisco Giants book was recently republished in paperback, so the publisher had me do a few radio interviews this month to publicize it. Last Sunday night, while being interviewed live on a sports radio show, everything was going well until the host asked me a question I couldn’t possibly answer. The question was something like: “How would you compare Juan Marichal’s pitching style with other Hall of Famers like Sandy Koufax?”
I had one or two seconds to comprehend the question, realize I had no answer, and to come up with an answer. My insides churned. So what did I do? I told him the truth. I recall laughing into the phone and saying, “Well, I wish I could answer that, but I can’t because I wasn’t alive when they pitched. Maybe you would be a better person to answer that for me?”
He had to answer his own question. The guy threw me a curveball and I hit it right back at him!
Media’s use (or mis-use) of “troops”
Since when did the word, “troop,” mean one person? Print and TV journalists are using it that way everyday. “Bush is deploying 21,500 new troops to Iraq” or “15 troops died in a Baghdad car bombing.”
Don’t we in the media really mean, “soldiers” or “troop members?” My old trusty Associated Press Stylebook defines a troop as a “group of persons or animals.” My paperback American Heritage dictionary and Dictionary.com give similar definitions.
Since when did the definition change? I mean: we wouldn’t call a lone Boy Scout a troop, but we’d say a Boy Scout troop is made up of a number of Boy Scouts.
Anyway, it’s annoying.