Following is my email message to the AP information email address ([EMAIL PROTECTED]
).
Bill Hooper
=====================
Greetings:
On numerous occasions I have been disappointed to see articles in
which measurement information is relevant to the story and in which it
is quite clear that the original measures were probably metric, yet
the measurement reference is converted to our Olde English units.
Response to inquiries into why this is so often done, usually refer to
the AP Stylebook as the guide upon which newspapers and others rely.
Indeed they feel compelled to follow it.
Surely our reading public is more intelligent and educated than you
give them credit for. Most have at least a passing familiarity with
metric units even if they are not proficient with them. It would be
appropriate to give a brief conversion to English units
parenthetically to assist the reader who is less familiar with metric,
but converting to English and omitting the metric entirely is to omit
the actual facts as they sere developed. One could also note that,
with increased metric usage, your readers would benefit from the
inclusion of metric values as a way for them to improve their
familiarity with the measurement system used by 95% of the people on
Earth.
It is also true that there are many Americans who are not only
familiar with metric but prefer them. It is doing them a disservice to
use non-metric units exclusively and omit the metric units entirely in
so many instances. For them it would even seem appropriate to suggest
that articles derived from sources using the English units should have
them converted to metric for our metric savvy public. Printing the
metric equivalent parenthetically after the original non-metric value
would be welcomed by many.
If we should wish to enter into a dialog about the possibility that
the AP Stylebook could be modified to remove the suppression of metric
and make it easier for publications to include metric information
where appropriate without violating AP guidelines, whom should we
contact? Any help you could give me in identifying the appropriate
person to write to would be most welcome.
Regards,
William Hooper
