International Herald Tribune, Sat-Sun 19-20 July 2008. Polands Drag Racers are off and running by Nicholas Kulish.
snip> could challenge each other head to head over two-fifths of a kilometer, or a quarter mile.< I took a double take on this, it's Poland so the course length is meters, I'm annoyed 400 m was changed by this reporter to fractions of a kilometer. Can anyone come up with his address. I'm sitting in a airport with no internet access. Mike Payne ----- Original Message ----- From: FunkyMart.com To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Tuesday, 08 July 2008 07:22 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?
