Ghost of JSK demands accuracy

Here's an anecdote sent to the blog by Philip Meyer, the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer was the Washington correspondent of the Beacon Journal 1962-1966. He is the author of Precision Journalism, the seminal 1973 book (and subsequent editions) that encouraged journalists to incorporate social science methods in the pursuit of better journalism.

Meyer writes:

In 1989, David Arant (now of Memphis State University) and I published an analysis of the copy editing accuracy of 58 newspapers. Electronic archives were a novelty then, and we figured you could evaluate the copy desk by searching for common misspellings, e.g. judgement for judgment and miniscule for minuscule. The Akron Beacon Journal was the best edited of the 58 by a full standard deviation -- a remarkable achievement.

I called Dale Allen to congratulate him and to learn his secret for avoiding bad spelling. "That's the residue of Jack Knight spending six months of the year here," he said. "He hated stuff like that." Knight had been dead for eight years, but the culture he left behind had persisted. His ghost was still watching over the newsroom.

In the period 1995-2003, my students and I ran another series of tests among 20 newspapers that I was studying for a project that eventually became "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age" (University of Missouri Press, 2004). The Beacon's spelling accuracy had fallen to 9th place. By then, of course, Knight Ridder was under different management. As Kurt Vonnegut liked to say, so it goes.

Phil Meyer
Chapel Hill, N.C.