Electric Fishwrap

Our cops reporter, Tahlia Ganser, just returned from Florida after spending six weeks at Poynter’s summer fellowship (7/25: link changed, here’s a new one). She returned with many observations, exciting stories and a clear vision of the future.

For reporters, that includes video. To not study video journalism as a reporter is a death knell to your career. So where do we start?

(This video is Cyndy Green’s rebuttal to Andy Dickenson’s Quality and Quantity shorts)

Reporters cannot afford to wait for someone else to train us. No need to reinvent the wheel, there are plenty of training resources if you look in the right places.

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Ever run spell check to see what your sources’ names would look like afterward? I have, to hilarious result. I’m reserving the corrected names to protect the innocent, but try running your name through a spell checker to see what I mean.

In any case, the AP ran a story about spell-check gone wild in a high school yearbook.

Middletown Area High School’s yearbook listed Max Zupanovic as “Max Supernova,” Kathy Carbaugh as “Kathy Airbag” and Alessandra Ippolito as “Alexandria Impolite,” just to name a few.

Only four of the yearbook pages have those corrections on them.

Just goes to show that spell check is not a good backup system. That’s what good copy editors are for.