PHOENIX (TC) — Solemnly they filed into the briefing room at Arizona
State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism: the journalists, the
bloggers and those who tweet on behalf of celebrities. Only the
scratching of nib against paper and the clicking of keys broke the
unpropitious hush, as those in attendance prepared to record the
announcement.
And then, at the stroke of 2pm, the representatives of the Associated
Press took to the stage. Total silence now. The calm before the
bombshell: no less impactful for being anticipated.
“Daddy,” generations of children as yet unborn will ask, “where were you when the Associated Press
removed the hyphen from the word ‘e-mail’?”
Yes, after this morning’s world-changing announcement, the
jounalistic cyber-pedantry landscape will never look the same. Never
mind the fact that most of us dropped the hyphen from “e-mail” around
about the same time we stopped dialling up to Compuserve. And never mind
that the AP’s acknowledgment that email is a distinct and legitimate
communications medium comes just as the rest of the world has moved on
to IMs and DMs.
No, never mind any of that: this a monumental development – as big at least as the moment when,
earlier this month,
the Pope finally declared that we should all stop blaming the Jews for
killing Jesus; or the time last week when my mother finally realised she
didn’t have to begin every IM to me with the greeting “Dear Paul,”.
The change doesn’t become official until 2am tomorrow morning (CDT) —
but at least one AP writer was happy to risk his job by breaking his
own employer’s embargo…
Under the headline “
Innocence Project professor pulled from class”, the unnamed AP writer wrote…
“A Northwestern University journalism professor whose
students are credited with helping to free more than 10 innocent men
from prison – including death row – has been pulled from the class that
made him famous amid allegations of ethics violations.
David Protess told the Chicago Tribune he was notified by email this
week that he wouldn’t be teaching the investigative journalism course
for the upcoming quarter.”
“Notified by
email.” Just seeing it written like that gives me goosebumps.
But that’s not all; just as the assembled throng in the briefing room
of Arizona State were regaining their collective wits, the AP
spokespeople struck out with not one but two additional haymakers.
Effective Saturday morning, both “cell phone” –
boom! – and “smart phone” -
thwack!
– will become self-contain nouns. They won’t even go through the
hyphenated gestation period: from 2am tomorrow, as if by magic, the
words cellphone and smartphone will pop, fully formed, into existence.
For an Internet purist like me, this is starting to look like a
worrying escalation: a sign that the once-staid AP might be losing their
heads in the Internet age. With e-mail and “cell phone” and “smart
phone” gone, how long can it be until “home page” ceases to be two
words? And then… well…
First they came for e-mail, but I haven’t used the hyphenated form for years, so I did nothing.
Then they came for “cell phone” and “smart phone” but I’m not my grandparents, so I did nothing.
… and then they came for the uppercase ‘I’ in ‘Internet’.
Out of my cold, dead hands, AP. Out of my cold, dead hands.
