Anyone who has done any professional or semi-professional writing has no doubt come across the AP Stylebook.

In journalism school we followed its Canadian equivalent (the CP Stylebook) like the Bible.

Basically it gives you guidelines to follow so that news publications have the same standard and that media is consistent.  It lists spelling, grammar, abbreviation, capitalization, punctuation, numerals, titles and more.

Today on Twitter I found the Fake AP Stylebook and it’s hilarious.

A few examples:
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s obvious that the world of social media has affected the world of journalism. I am a journalist by trade, but the profession definitely needs to adapt in order to survive.

For example, over the summer there was a tornado just outside Toronto. At first I watched the local news in order to get the details (weather warnings, etc.) but I quickly switched to Twitter for my news.

While the television stations stuck with expert reports from their journalists and PR people, the Internet was already full of eyewitness accounts. As the TV hosts plastered email addresses and phone numbers on the screen, hoping to hear first-person accounts, I was watching YouTube videos of the tornado just minutes after it happened. By the time the weather had improved and the traditional media was hyping photo galleries of user-submitted photos, I had already seen as much as I needed to through Twitter.

The next day news stations were showing the very videos I had watched on YouTube the day before. It was a very concrete example of how social media is superior to traditional media in regards to breaking news.

Read the rest of this entry »