Stan, there was an article in a recent LA Times about time and GMT -- no reference to UTC. I wrote the writer a brief note about UTC and the fact it is universally used and that GMT was to be deprecated. I explained the origin and why UTC is used. I said that he missed a great opportunity to educate the public about UTC. He gave me the courtesy of no response. Not directly related to SI but close, I think.
Marion Moon ------ Original Message ------ Received: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:22:59 AM PDT From: "STANLEY DOORE" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:41352] Re: Journalism & AP Guidelines Nice going Victor. It shows how much control the media have over what the public reads, sees and hears. It's not surprising. My experience has shown that newspaper editors and writers are opposed to the metric system regardless of its ease of use, its use in science and technology, and its use internationally. Keep up the good work! Stan Doore ----- Original Message ----- From: Victor Jockin To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 1:24 AM Subject: [USMA:41351] Re: Journalism & AP Guidelines With respect to journalistic style guidelines, I e-mailed Kenneth Chang of the New York Time regarding an article he wrote covering NASA's current Mercury probe mission. A very nice piece, but full of references to miles, even though an accompanying NASA photo showed notations in kilometers. I was pleased to get a prompt reply, which made clear that Ken, perhaps not surprisingly for a science writer, is as much an advocate of the metric system as any of us. But his employer sets style guidelines on this issue that are similar to AP's, portions of which Ken quotes in his response below. To reiterate, it seems to me that we should start building a list of signatories in science, education, journalism, etc., to protest guidelines in journalistic style manuals mandating the use of traditional US measurement units. Perhaps, eventually, Mr. Chang could be a weighty addition to that list. From: Victor Jockin To: Kenneth Chang Date: July 7, 2008 Thanks for your excellent article about NASA's mission to Mercury. Outstanding science reporting is one reason I'm loyal to the Times. Consistent with practice across nearly all fields of science, NASA has principally used metric units of measure for many years. I believe the last vestiges of traditional units are being phased out now, with the upcoming retirement of the shuttle. The excellent service you and other Times science reporters provide in educating the public would be enhanced if you would publish measures in the units that scientists actually used to report them, perhaps with parenthetical translations. We all learned metric units in grade school, and for readers of the Times science pages, even parenthetical translations into traditional units are scarcely necessary. Keep up the great science reporting, but help America keep moving forward on metric usage, as NASA is doing, and pass on NASA's measurements straight-up. From: Kenneth Chang To: Victor Jockin Date: July 8, 2008 Thank you very much for the compliments. I personally would love it if the U.S. went metric -- I've generated a number of corrections by botching the conversion from metric to English units (all too easy to do, since no one thinks in millionths of an inch or minus-500 Fahrenheit, and then it's too late before you realize minus-500 is impossible). The New York Times stylebook says, "Ordinarily convert measurements from the metric system to the American one. Delete the original measure unless it is truly useful." Putting both values in gets clumsy and distracting (in the same way that the speed limit signs in mph and km/hr were never useful or edifying). On the Web, we could insert pop-up links so that the reader could move the mouse over a quantity and the metric value would pop up. I haven't been able to convince anyone to implement this idea... Thanks for your email. ----- Original Message ----- From: VictorJockin To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 3:22 AM Subject: [USMA:41344] Journalism & AP Guidelines I've been thinking about the issue of the AP style guidelines that came up a couple of weeks back, and it seems to me that we need to put our heads together and decide what our best shot is at doing something about this. Requiring traditional units in news stories, typically to the exclusion of metric units, is obviously a huge obstacle to general use of metric. But it's a barrier that doesn't require legislative action to fix, something we lack the influence and/or money to achieve. It wouldn't be easy to change AP's mind, of course, but it would be easier than changing Congress's mind, and would represent an important and concrete step forward. First, we could use our existing connections to assemble the largest coalition of scientists, educators, journalists, etc., that we can. Through networking, the group of signatories could grow quite large. We may need to circulate a draft for some time, perhaps a year or more, and we should focus on recruiting as many journalists and journalism professors as possible. Then, we need to jointly and formally approach AP with our statement, and the angle we should take with them, it seems to me, is objectivity. Journalistic style guidelines should not require reporters to take sides on social issues, or to advocate for particular political outcomes. Traditional units, we should point out, are not the law of the land, but a social preference. And in fact, it was the intent of Congress to initiate and encourage a voluntary transition away from that historical social preference and toward the metric system. Should this transition take place or not? That's a social and political question that a journalist should not be required, as a matter of style, to take sides on. And yet, that is just what AP is doing. It would be as if AP specified that journalists not use the term African American in place of black. Social preferences continually evolve on such issues, and good journalists are witnesses, not advocates, during such transitions. Thoughts?
