It's a stylistic flourish that dates back to the days when reporters would file stories they typed out on typewriters. (Quick show of hands: How many of you still know how to change typewriter ribbons? OK, how many of you worked with typewriters in the first place? Never mind.)
Within the journalism profession, it's become a tradition to label your farewell piece as the -30- column. Explanations vary. The one that I most like equates the number with a "sign of completion."
That's a nice poetic approach, though it's only nine years since I arrived at CNET in late 2000. Some of you may recall that I came over when ZDNet got acquired in a merger of two of the tech industry's biggest Internet publishers. Just in time for the bubble to burst and the economy to go bust. Nine years later and I'm changing company logos again--again just in time for the bubble to burst and the economy to go bust. Well, I was never very good about timing, but as the prophet says, this, too, shall pass.
Why, then, after all this time, am I bidding CNET News readers farewell? It has nothing to do with boredom. The story line that defines the technology business remains as fascinating as it was in 1985. That's when I began covering the retail side of the computer business for a trade weekly. (A weekly! How quaint.) Though I never did a statistical study, I'm willing to wager that this industry remains chockablock with more smart and interesting people per capita than any other. State secret: I always counted on being the dumbest person in the room during an interview. If I was sharp, it meant that I'd walk away having learned something new. How many people can look forward to the same?
Since I can hear the copy desk already grumbling "get to the 'lede' already," let's get to the meat of the matter. Yours truly is moving over to work on the CBS News Web site, where I'll be working on a terrifically exciting project. There will be more to say about that at a later time. What's more, I'm not going to completely disappear from the map. Fact is that you will still see my byline gracing CNET News from time to time (CBS, you'll remember, owns CNET), though this will be it as a regular gig for Coop's Corner.
Spring has finally sprung out here in San Francisco and I won't spoil it all by turning mawkish. Besides, you'll know where to find me. But before signing off one final time, I must tip my hat and acknowledge you, the readers, for making this one very rewarding ride. Sometimes we agreed, other times we parted ways, but throughout my tenure, your feedback always informed my writing and thinking. Even if I fell short the first time, your input helped me better approach a topic the next time around. It was a dialectic that I found invaluable.
Then again, isn't that the beauty of the Internet?
-30-
Bobbie Johnson, who blogs for the Guardian.co.uk, has published what may be the silliest post of 2008. But let's not rush to judgment; there are still nine more days, so he still has a chance to top himself.
Earlier today, we reported that Apple's AppStore rejected a book authored by our CNET colleague, David Carnoy, because it said the work contained "objectionable content." The rejection cited a clause in the iPhone SDK that states: "Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."
You decide.
(Credit:
CNET News)
Tom Krazit's piece described the following:
"In its rejection letter, Apple singled out the passage in question, which we actually can't print either. Let's just say it involves a teenage girl telling a detective that she overheard her friend asking a gentleman caller to "love me like you mean it," just with a slightly more emphatic verb."
It's not terribly difficult to put two and two together. (Even Johnson was able to figure that one out.) But under the flamboyant title, "CNET censors story on iPhone censorship," (subtitled: A sad tale of how fearless campaigners against censorship couldn't bring themselves to say one little word), Johnson reserves his verbal shotgun for our choice of language. To wit:
"CNet's complaint about Apple censorship (thinly-veiled as a "now Apple's screening edgy books" story) is undermined somewhat by the fact that the CNET website won't even print the offending word.
Maybe it was a super slow day at The Guardian or perhaps he could not resist the titillation. But Johnson was milking this for all it was worth to play the part of bad boy.
"Well, I've got no such compunction about swearing--hey, we're all grown-ups, right?--so here are the terrifying literary tidbits that both Apple and CNET thought we couldn't handle."
The rest of his post quotes portions of the texts containing the words supposedly too much for us to bear. So since the blogosphere is a continuing conversation--ostensibly, to help us understand who we all are and what we believe--let me fill in the holes left by Johnson's lazy fiction with fact.
Context, not shock value, is the ultimate arbiter on whether language is appropriate or not. For instance, my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, periodically publishes short stories in which the dialogue gets raw. Quite raw. Some may pine for the days when The New Yorker was not so "modern." Not I. Its pages are simply a reflection of an increasingly complicated modernity.
So why treat our pages differently? We don't. Again, it's all context. Here's a link to previous CNET News articles where the subject matter and the language complemented each other.
The gist of The Guardian piece is that we don't have the guts to call things by their proper name because we're a bunch of prudes. Was Tom Krazit's post about Apple any less newsworthy because he opted to be descriptive rather than blunt? I don't think so.
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