CJR: Yahoo’s New Digital Media Stylebook

Posted on | August 13, 2010 | No Comments

By Bill Grueskin
August 12, 2010 11:11 a.m.

The Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World | St. Martin’s Griffin | 528 pages, $21.99

If you strolled by a copy editor’s desk at any metro newsroom thirty years ago, you would have likely seen, sandwiched between the pica pole and the Carter’s Rubber Cement, a well-worn, dog-eared version of the Associated Press Stylebook. The glue pot and ruler are long gone. And now, in an age when anyone can publish instantaneously to any corner of the world, it’s worth asking whether the stylebook should be discarded as well.

One answer comes not from the AP or the descendants of Strunk and White, but from Yahoo Inc. The company recently published The Yahoo Style Guide, proclaiming it “the ultimate sourcebook for writing, editing and creating content for the digital world.” At more than five hundred pages, and with an accompanying robust Web site, it is remarkable both for what it addresses (everything from hyphenating compound modifiers to abbreviating state names) and for what it says about where journalism is headed in the twenty-first century.

Read the entire story at Columbia Journalism Review.

Category: Archives, Books, Digital Journalist, Writing
Tags: > > >

Comments

Leave a Reply





  • Welcome to Our Community

     

    Susan Older
    Founder
    DisplacedJournalists™
    and its parent company
    Real World Media™

        Is there life – or work – after newspapers? A lot of us are in the process of finding out. Because it’s generally a somewhat lonely endeavor, it struck me, in January 2010, that it might be comforting – and possibly very productive – to go through it together.

        Displaced Journalists is a community – our community – where we find common ground, where we can begin to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with our lives and livelihoods. [more]

  • Archives

  • Categories