AngryJournalist.com - Why are you angry today?
Angry Journalist #6039:
To #5870
Everytime I turn in an article, I turn in clean copy with no errors, just to have my editors f*** with it and add grammitical and style errors.
Im SICK of it. Why do I even take the time? Careless a**holes.
Learn how to spell “grammatical,” you inflamed dumbass. And you might even consider substituting the easier-to-spell, and more appropriate, “grammar” instead. Mmm, and “everytime” is not a word. It’s two words. See if you, armed with your journalism degree, can guess where the split should be.
Folks, check out this site. It’s truly hilarious - a bunch of journos whining about their terrible lot in life in an extended screech that will brighten your whole weekend.
Feel their pain! And then roar with laughter. I did. I still am.
UPDATE: After reading several dozen of these hysterical howlers, I am struck by one aspect that just jumps out at even the casual reader: Most of these mokes can’t spell, apply standard grammar, or construct a sentence that makes much sense. No wonder they need four layers of editors. Many of them seem to be well nigh functionally illiterate. A comparable situation would be physicists unable to do basic math, or carpenters unable to properly pound nails or cut wood to fit. In what other field are the basic tools of your trade so improperly grasped?
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Software development.
Government?
Elementary and secondary Education!
Hey! I resemble that remark!
That being said, yeah, it’s amazing the ignorance of what I would consider basic knowledge (no pun intended) of computer architecture and operations is exhibited by people in this biz.
Sadly true, since around the mid-60’s onward, with gradually-increasing incidence - as the older teaching staff members died off, went into another (more-rewarding\lucrative) career or just simply retired into old age, the influx of the functionally-iiliterate/innumerate began. Why? Many reasons…mostly, classroom teaching became easier to get into (as demand increased, and a widening variety of opportunities drained off much of the better-educated supply), and there were few (if any) penalties for being bad at the job. A lot was said about making classroom personnel “accountable,” but not much was actually done.
By the time I left public-school teaching, in the mid-80’s, the quality of instruction - and of the “graduated” product - had deteriorated pretty substantially from when I entered the field, in the early 60’s; based upon observation, I’d say that, for the most part, it has continued to drop until the present…
I’m not at all surprised that basic “journalism” has declined, as well - these days, even many editors appear to be border-line in literacy, with a poor grasp of basic sciences, economics and/or history. How could any substantial part of the lower-level journos be expected to be better?
They’re graduates of prestigious state universities, where they majored in English and/or journalism. You were expecting..
Come to think of it, Algore has a degree in journalism. In occupational safety supervision we call that a “near miss”.
These guys are such goobers. If anyone needed to know why Americans don’t respect journalists, this is it. Its so sad that people get news from them.
Nowadays: almost all of them, sadly.
But that doesn’t matter with journos. What matters is that they feeeel the right way about the topics they write about.
“Feeeel” being defined as: leftist Green.
Are you sure those are real?
“All right, here’s pay copy. Title: ‘One for the Road.’”
“Jubal,” Anne said worriedly, “is your stomach upset?”“Always.”“That’s for file, too?”“Huh? That’s for the New Yorker.”“They’ll bounce it.”“They’ll buy it. It’s morbid, they’ll buy it.”“And besides, there’s something wrong with the scansion.”“Of course! You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.”— Jubal E. Harshaw (aka Robert A. Heinlein), Stranger In A Strange Land (1961)
P.S. Great commenting system — where the automatic preview doesn’t look at all like the final result. Brilliant.
“In what other field are the basic tools of your trade so improperly grasped?”
Rock n Roll and pop music generally.
“All right, here’s pay copy. Title: ‘One for the Road.”
“Jubal,” Anne said worriedly, “is your stomach upset?”
“Always.”
“That’s for file, too?”
“Huh? That’s for the New Yorker.”
“They’ll bounce it.”
“They’ll buy it. It’s morbid, they’ll buy it.”
“And besides, there’s something wrong with the scansion.”
“Of course! You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.”
— Jubal E. Harshaw (aka Robert A. Heinlein), Stranger In A Strange Land (1961)
I noticed #6028 looks a lot like James Lileks. the self-description fits, every word in the comment is spelled correctly, it’s grammatically correct, and it’s calmly reasoned and logical. It’s also completely ignored by the following rants.
James Lileks would probably know about the site, but why would he contribute a comment?
What was it Mark Twain said - that people fetch up in journalism after they’ve failed at ditchdigging?
JAR
(THAT Glenn sent me here :-)
Lorenzo: #6028 wasn’t saying what the mob wanted to hear.
Is journalism an exalted activity? Bill’s mention of carpenters brings to mind John W. Gardner’s observation that a society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy as an exalted one will have neither good philosophy nor good plumbing. Neither its theories nor its pipes will hold water.
From real life I’d extend the old aphorism — “… And them what can neither do, nor teach, scribbles.”
In aerospace engineering, rather a lot of high level workers are ignorant of Heron’s formula, which lets you calculate the area of a triangle (say, a wing or tail fin) from the length of the three sides. Rather a lot of our wings and fins are not right triangles.
Are you sure those are real?
I have to say, I do wonder about the post flagged by Bill. To be sure, there are writers out there who can’t spell or even type well (and there’s also Muphry’s Law). But that post sure smelled like the work of a beleaguered copy editor unleashing a little snark.
Writers and copy editors generally hold each other in contempt. These are the sorts of goofy things they do to mock the other.
Chris, read about a hundred of those posts. You’ll change your mind.
Bill, I’ve read about 200 or so of these posts. It’s like typeset crack. Every now and then, some voice of sanity floats to the top, but overall, the level of self-absorption equates to a Manhattan sized sponge dripping with pure, unadulterated teen angst. These poor numb-nuts have absolutely no clue as to why they’re irrelevant.
It’s amusing to see the “ageism” arguments flung about like so much mindless chaff. It doesn’t matter if they’re young or old. They’re all dinosaurs. Young stegosaurus? Old stegosaurus? Who cares? Their pea brains are split between their heads and their asses. As stone cold fossils, they are only interesting as dusty museum exhibits.
If this is where journalism is at the moment, then stick a fork in it. It’s done.
I have read many of those posts. But I’m not sure what part I’m supposed to change my mind about — I’ve already acknowledged that “there are writers out there who can’t spell or even type well.” And believe me: They’re not just in the journalism biz.
In fact, reading all those posts is exactly what makes me suspect that the one you’ve cited might be parody. There are lots of writers there complaining about the crappy stuff the copy desk does to their work. The post you cited can easily read like a copy editor in disguise, cleverly and hyperbolically making a point about the crappy stuff writers turn in. Copy editors spend a lot of time mocking writers, and this fits right in with the general vibe and approach.
Regardless, it affirms your essential point: There are writers who don’t properly grasp the basic tools of the trade. Even if that post is the work of a snarky copy editor, he or she is ultimately saying the same thing you are.
In the journalists’ defense, composing prose on blogs and Internet sites is not really optimal, because spell checkers are absent, the interface is typically sluggish, and because one cannot print out a post and edit (with pen in hand) before hitting, “Send.” A writer can be somewhat competent in front of a word processor, yet still end up making more mistakes than usual when posting on a blog. I suppose the more anal retentive among us could write on a word processor first, then copy and paste into the blog interface. But it’s awkward, and it takes extra effort.
I’m less worried about journalists’ grammar on relaxed blogs than I am about their pretty much willful misinterpretation and slanting of news in order to achieve their political goals.
SK, if you’re concerned about the absence of spell checkers on blogs and Internet sites, I’d suggest trying the Firefox browser. It has a spellchecker built in, and numerous add-ons that can do handy things such as formatting text and inserting links.
I read about 200 of those before I was completely sure it wasn’t a put-on. Talk about having an inflated sense of self-worth. Sheesh.
The best part was watching them tear each other like crazed beasts. I like to busted a gut laughing at the pretension.
Let’s see if I can list the funny parts. 1) You spend lots of borrowed tuition dollars pursuing a degree in ‘changing the world’. 2) You get cheated of an education because you’re majoring in English, which cares much more about deconstructing shallow novels written by female graduates of Ivy League colleges than teaching you how to write clearly, or in journalism, which cares more about explaining why “speaking Truth to Power” is more important than getting the facts straight. 3) Having failed to garner an education that means anything you join an industry in severe decline then whine about how it doesn’t pay well. 4) Having not quite figured out that you’re screwed if you stay in an industry that is dying (helloooo UAW), you insist that your total lack of salable skills should not be a barrier to earning big bucks. 5) Sensing somehow that you’re screwed, instead of looking for the answer (in a mirror, possibly) you turn on your professional colleagues.
Lord, I don’t remember when I laughed so hard.
Clueless, totally clueless (for the most part), and dumb as a bag of rusty hammers. Explain to me again why I should pay any attention to the average ‘journalist’?
Evil and Jorg, thanks for dropping by! I should have given you credit, Evil, for that link. My apologies.
Jorg, I miss you around these parts.
Tell you what, Fuckface, why don’t you cut Clayton a retainer check and I’m sure he’ll code it however you like. Until then, you’re invited to go screw yourself, scamper back to
Romper RoomBlogspot, or pay for the ice cream you eat, seeing as you don’t care for the free ice cream Bill is providing.(Bill, sorry about transgressing on your prerogatives, but I had a crappy weekend, needed to vent, and along comes Mikey the Chew Toy.)
Hey! I resemble that remark.
God, I love the Muphry’s Law bit. Thanks for making explicit what I’ve known intuitively for a long while.
Steve, always feel free to unleash the wire scrotum brush of enlightenment whenever you see a need. You needn’t wait for me. If I want to, I’ll catch up. Otherwise, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the show.
Goes for all of you other folks, too. Remember, no matter how hard we try, Barnum’s Law guarantees that we will never run out of chew toys, no matter how badly we treat the ones fate and fancy deposit on our doorstep.
As my liberal friend the carpenter said: “I’ve cut this board three times and it’s still too shoort. What should I do now”
Tell your liberal friend to go get a real carpenter to lend him a board stretcher, that’s what…
BTW, so long as I’m here:
Yo, Don…Yes, I work in aerospace engineering; no, not always at a “high level” - but even I am aware that, due to basic geometric principles, there is no triangle possible whose area cannot be solved for using the simple-but-effective rules of right triangles - might need a bit of extra arithmetic here and there, but otherwise…nothing really difficult involved - slightly-complex formulae might be a bit more elegant, but unnecessary and not really quicker or more accurate.
By contrast, the general quality of spelling/grammar/prose on this very page seems to be quite good. Are there talents displayed here that are absent elsewhere? Or is everyone just being very careful?
Pride in workmanship.
Don’t criticise people for their English when you go around calling maths “math” (can’t you speak proper? :)). Journalists writing quickly - of course they’ll make mistakes. It shows they’re good writers - second-raters are the ones who mind their ps and qs on first draft. Good writers crank it out then go back and polish.
I hate to say it, but…
I think the average age of DP commenters puts us in a generation that actually learned grammar and spelling in school. We also feel compelled to write prose that does not exhibit obvious flaws.
Much of the email-and-text-messaging generation is perfectly comfortable slamming out text with obvious flaws. Many never got to the point that grammar is automatic; others know decent English principles but excuse sloppiness in anything done on-line, considering it a worthwhile sacrifice for speed.
Bad grammar and lots of misspelled words are associated with ignorance and lack of education in my mind. Such flaws do not have the same connotation for many that are, say, twenty years younger than me.
Can’t you write proper American English? Have you ever run into the proper usage of the adverb, for instance?
Can you back this up with something other than crap you just pulled out of your ass? If so, let’s hear it.
Fair warning: I am a professional writer with 28 books, fiction and non-fiction, published at major houses, dozens of short stories published in major magazines, magazine journalism experience, and a produced screenwriter as well. I may well know considerably more of what you are blabbering about than you do.
In general, what you see here is what you get.
That is, however, comparing apples to oranges. While there are professional writers posting here (I am one, for instance), almost all of those writing here don’t claim to write for a living - as do journalists.
I’d like to step from that to address what Billy just posted, as well. Billy, these are pros, supposedly. They may be younger, but still, professionals. Simple self esteem would seem to require that they not post public writing that makes them appear to be lame amateurs.
Some of us used to be annoyed at experts in one field pretending to expertise in a different, and unrelated field. In this case, these “experts” don’t even pretend to expertise in their own.
And that is where the God of Irony has been dancing a fandango on their clueless skulls.
Show of hands: How many professional writers here?
[rant] As an engineer, I don’t know whether I am also a professional writer or not. But the Company decided my formal writings must pass through a professional writer before they are exposed to customers, to insert the quota of misspellings, grammatical gaffes, factual inexactitudes, etc., one apparently might expect(!?) from a professional writer. My attempts to edit his “efforts” are ignored. [/rant]
Sorry. I needed that.
If you mean someone who makes their living primarily by writing, I’d expect a relatively small number.
But if you expand that to people who have at some point had published works, I suspect that group is over-represented here. I’ve written a few books on software development that I doubt anyone here would care about.
I see, Not That Glenn. As an engineer, you judge the expected abilities of an entire class by one example.
If so, as an engineer, you need more than that rant.
I’d also like to see the before-and-after of what is actually the application of an editing process, not a professional writing process, before I decide how much weight to give your rant in the first place.
It was a dark and stormy night….no…wait, it was 4:30 a.m. and I was facing yet another surf-perfect San Diego day. So I made the mistake of surfing over here to laugh at many of your comments and then over to the subject, angryjournalist.com. It was unconciously informative of the unspoken flakiness behind the wretched copy and antics of “modern” newspaper journalism.
I stopped reading the LA Times the day Arnold Schwartzenegger was first elected. The LAT stopped getting my half-buck every morning, and more importantly for ad revenue, a pair of eyes. The LAT, infamously biased to the leftist/marxist/parasite California democratic party, made a highly inflammatory attack on the candidate, based on “new” information they had clearly been saving, and it was made on election eve. This clearly violated the long held journalistic standard against “new attacks” where a candidate could not reply. It wasn’t just me, some of the LAT’s own old guard was clearly pissed. But it was diagnostic of a major toxin killing the MSM. Readers want information, not bias nor overheated and self-indulgent opinion parading as news.
Angryjournalist.com is more than just howling funny (with some occasional sage advice from old hands). It makes it clear that academic creds are needed to land a job in the papers rather than apprenticeship. This is behind some of the problem of dwindling readership because journalism clearly is a craft. If your plan is to become a pretentious academic goldbricker in a no-content discipline, then you need to be processed by a department of illiberal education. If not, you don’t. It’s vicious and selfish that the academic departments providing journalism’s “job tickets” churn out the pathetic twits we see at angryjournalist. It takes incredible dishonesty to send them out thinking that the devoluted navel-gazing of university liberal arts/modern English is a fungible, freely tradable good called journalism, and that I as a reader give a rats-ass about these young journalist’s childish “in-depth” “deconstructionist” insights on policy, politics, community and how my personal life should be ordered. Their academic enablers are rotten, sinecured parasites feeding these kids into a funnel without an opening. Man and woman alike they deserve the rope. But what can we (as grown-ups) say to the “new” journalists pouring out of this academic racket, now with four fewer years of life in front of them? Nothing but “poor thing”.
As a “derivatives consultant” in the 80s, I wrote constantly for remarkable fees a very large number of various documents, brochures, presentations and speeches for, among others, Deutsche Bank, Chase, Chemical, PaineWebber…you get the drift. At one point I was the principal English speechwriter for two Chairmen (”speakers”) of Deutsche Bank.
At one meeting, where I was presenting a preview of a landmark speech( to be given by the Chairman to an august NYC audience) to the Board of Managing Directors of Deutsche, the final draft was handed out, and the CFO took out his beautiful silver Mount Blanc fountain pen, when the Chairman said:
“Put your pen away. If you knew how much we have paid for each of these words, you would not be so quick to change any of them.”
I am always amused by those “professionals” who say “so what if there are a few grammatical errors, as long as the meaning comes through.”
This like a concert pianist saying: “So what if I hit a few wrong notes…”
There is no room whatever for technical imprecision in any language by a so-called expert. The language has evolved over a very long time to convey precise shades and nuances of meaning. Sloppiness is sloppiness, not “creativity,” and impedes meaning, not to mention effect.
Call I Ishmael.
As I recall, that was Horowitz’s position.
When you’re Horowitz, you can say whatever you damned well please.
But first, you have to become as good as Horowitz. And Serkin would, I expect, disagree with him.
Hmmm. Here’s a big clue right here, way back at the beginning:
The AP Stylebook concerns itself with the following things (at least it did back when I was familiar with it, but it’s had twenty years to go downhill along with the rest of the profession):
Yep, death to that.
Okay. Change that to “So what if I didn’t hit the right notes…”
So would I, for that matter. I just wanted to watch nemo scramble a bit.
And yanking the thread in an entirely different direction, does anybody know how Ivo Pogorelich is doing? I know he ended his seclusion and gave the NYT music critic a heart attack a couple of years ago, but since then…?
I have three teenagers. It’s a good day when I know how I’m doing.
SteveF short for self-described Fuckface writes:
«P.S. Great commenting system — where the automatic preview doesn’t look at all like the final result. Brilliant.»
Tell you what, Fuckface, why don’t you cut Clayton a retainer check and I’m sure he’ll code it however you like. Until then, you’re invited to go screw yourself, scamper back to Romper Room Blogspot, or pay for the ice cream you eat, seeing as you don’t care for the free ice cream Bill is providing.
(Bill, sorry about transgressing on your prerogatives, but I had a crappy weekend, needed to vent, and along comes Mikey the Chew Toy.)
So if your brilliant commenting system deceives posters as to what their posting is going to look like, it’s their fault and they’re “fuckfaces.” And such profanity in response to a polite comment gets acclaim from the host(s). Nice to know.
I suggest that Clayton (if he is who’s responsible) simply jerk out the preview function, rather than continuing to jerk around commenters in this regard (and then having pals swear at them when they complain).
And yes, Blogger’s preview has never done that to me, or my viewers.
Since he asked for it, here’s Fuckface McNeil’s first attempt, exactly as he submitted it. My first impulse, when I saw it, was to clean up the formatting, but then I saw his follow-up.
I invite you all to consider how much can properly be blamed on comment preview. If Fuckface hadn’t immediately embarked on a massive proof of how little he’s worth it, I’d be curious to know exactly how he coded his line-breaks — assuming he provided them — so that I might dig into what, if anything, happened to them.
Fuckface, you remind me of a young lady (I use that term loosely) who submitted a badly-written letter to the editor, then, when we cleaned it up before running it, had the nerve to complain in another illiterate letter about the “hacket job” we did on it. We ran her second letter as-is, and, strangely, never heard from her again.
This was your “polite” comment, you passive-aggressive pile of shit:
Now go whine on somebody else’s shoulder. You - and your pathetically fragile self-esteem - will get only short shrift around here.
Dumbass.
OK. I is Ishmael.
Now what?
An I for an I.
Hmmm.
Emphasis added. Somehow I think Lileks would have done a better job.
Well, Clayton, I was looking at the poster’s self-description as a mid-careerist, blogging 2-3 times a day, writing four columns a week and dabbling in video. That’s pretty much what Lileks does. I gloss over some misspellings and other inaccuracies in his bleat posts because he blogs at all hours, and it’s not his day job. The #6028 post is still head and shoulders above the others.
You go on a long sea voyage, in which you are variously exposed to sundry personalities who teach you something about life, and finally, are capsized by a faceless mask represented by a whale, and are the lone survivor, picked up by a ship looking for something else.
That’s what passes for polite in Fuckfaceland?
Using Billy Hollis’s criteria, perhaps I am a professional writer, albeit largely confined to writing technical manuals for products I worked on.
No, I judge one member of a set. Thus a rant, followed by apology. I should not have implied this fellow was a writer. He was hired as one. Your mileage may differ.
Before/after. As I said, I write technical documents. Well, there was no “before” as prelude to this little gratuitous little introduced howler
[emph mine] The word “setup” is a verb in neither this nor any other context I know of. The verb is “set up.” Elsewhere I wrote of a hardware widget called a PRN generator. They natively have “forward” and “reverse” directions, but mathematicians and hardware designers tend to differ about which is which. (I’d be unsurprised if someone commenting here is familiar.) Attempting to be diplomatic I wrote
immediately followed by a definition. Somehow that morphed into
immediately followed by the definition. Our hero nevertheless managed to go through a 162-page document without feeling need to ask a single question. He understood well enough to suit himself.
Here, perhaps, I should stop.
Sigh. No, probably your “editor” should stop. Is he (or she) perhaps related by blood to some of the management?
Yes.
Clayton Jones writes:
Since he asked for it, here’s Fuckface McNeil’s first attempt, exactly as he submitted it. My first impulse, when I saw it, was to clean up the formatting, but then I saw his follow-up.
I submitted it that way, because my first trial, which looked exactly (except for italics tags and the like) like my second actual posting, was grossly distorted as presented by the “automatic preview,” to the point where in my judgment it interfered with reading — so I modified the submission until it did (in preview) look like what I wanted (which is to say, my second actual posting). Whereupon, when I hit submit, it became the mass of garbage revealed (as my first posting) above.
As for cleaning up my formatting, why don’t you clean up the automatic preview (or else, as I say, just jerk it out as worse than useless) instead.
Meanwhile, from all your comments I see you’re a whole crew of assholes.
Hey, sweet cheeks, you’re actually getting the sensitive treatment here, because we can see that you’re, well, special.
You want assholes? Just hang around a bit longer, sport. The way you’re going, we’ll be feeding your entrails - metaphorically speaking, of course. Although I can’t speak for my colleagues; YMMV, etc., etc… - to the dogs, who will probably hold that against us, because deep down, the dogs understand just what a passive-aggressive, no-talent, limp-dicked, anal-retentive, petty shitheel you really are.
And if the dogs feel that way, well, you can just imagine how everyone else here is looking at you.
Now, get outside. Go play in traffic. Scoot!
Mojo, McNeil is showing all the signs of being one of those dumb-as-a-post visitors who will continue, and continue, and continue to post his moronic drivel, oblivious to the horrible pounding he is taking, consoling himself with his conviction that he’s doing a wonderful job in dealing with all us “assholes.”
Pathetic little nobody. I’ve found that to be the case with this type of public masochist: He’ll keep it up if only because somebody is actually noticing him, and in his stunted little life, notice, even if it is only a boot in the chops, is about the best he can hope for.
Yeah, Bill. I see what you’re saying. And you’re right.
But, I can hope, can’t I? That I’ll find that one blithering idiot pissing merrily around the bathroom like a drunken yuppie at the Foxfield Races. I could take that blithering idiot and perhaps transform him into a mere dullard, drooling in the corner. But at least he’d be sorta quiet, sucking on his thumb, moaning softly to himself.
Ah, who am I kidding? McNeil’s never gonna get beyond blithering idiot, is he?
Win some. Lose some.
Bill Quick:
Hardly. I have no wish to hang around in a shithole.
I am amazed though. You attract Instalanches from time to time, other people no doubt arrive to look around as well. It’s amazing that you think it’s perfectly all right to present a preview function to the public that deceives posters into formats that then are posted as garbage — whom you then denigrate as “Fuckheads” and the like.
If you doubt me try feeding my original posting code into the preview. It is decidedly not garbage as it interprets it, whereas look how it turned out when posted. I was not attempting to fuck with you; whereas you’re perfectly happy leaving what’s basically a trap for unwary posters lying around, then laugh when someone falls in (someone who stupidly thinks your preview is good for anything more than seeing if italics is closed properly, say).
Anyway, good-bye and good riddance.
Hmm McNeil, I suggest you practice with Professional Write 1.x for a few months, then come back and try again, I suspect, though, regardless of your inability to format your message properly, that the content will still be vapid.
Damn. Took him long enough.
We are not a crew! You take that back!
Gee, how come nobody else has “Genius” McNeil’s problems with the Deadly Comment Ant Lion Pit?
Could it be…the problem’s with him?
Naw.
What was that?
SDI (Sudden Dumbass Infestation).
OK, I know this thread is kaput, but I just want to post this here for the record:
What annoys me about the above sentiment is the implicit idea that good grammar and spelling (and typing, I guess) are hard. As if the only way to get it all right is by being slow and pedantic, and thus “good writers” do this slow-and-pedantic part on the back end rather than letting it clog up their thinking process.
No. I think a truly good writer is someone who is so masterful with the “basic tools of the trade,” to use the going phrase, they can be brilliant and clean out of the gate. Sure, everyone is apt to make mistakes, and polishing rarely hurt anybody. But it’s goofy to imply that grammar and spelling are so difficult that “cranking it out” and “being polished” are incompatible. Speak for yourself.
Actually, out in the real world where the pro writers (unlike the journo samples we saw above) labor, clean copy is expected. I can recall my first editor, John Silbersack, complimenting me on it - “hardly needs a copy editor,” he told me once. I told him he was getting basic first draft stuff as far as grammar and punctuation went, and he said, “Actually, I’m not surprised. You’re a good writer, and that’s the way they write.”
Stuck with me ever since.
Which is probably what the angry journalist in question was griping about. Not the correctness part, but the obsession with brevity part. Or, possibly more likely, the complainer in question really meant “soulless” AP style, as opposed to other versions — soulless being the variant enforced at some publications. There are also rigid, irrationally-applied, and other happy variants…