When is a meeting not a meeting?

Ok, that's kind of a riddle. A meeting of a governing body, in New Jersey and most other states, must be advertised so the public knows and can attend if they chose. The trouble is, in small towns, there may be only three members on a governing body. Which means, when two of them meet by chance at the Post Office, it can be an illegal town meeting. Some officials are happy about this. They use any opportunity they can to discuss municipal business illegally. Others try their best to avoid illegal meetings. Unfortunately, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. The public needs to be informed about the rules and also savvy enough to cut officials some slack. It pays to assume they are acting in your best interest until proven otherwise. And when proven otherwise, yell like crazy.

Why did you major in THAT?

Do student journalists really understand the importance of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable? Are they dedicated to the principles that guide the true believers? Or are they going into the business for other reasons? Can't imagine what those would be. Certainly not the money. . .There was a prestige factor right after Watergate when Woodward and Bernstein were the heroes of the moment, but now, reporters aren't exactly respected. Actually, many of them aren't exactly reporters. Most news organizations don't have the budget for detailed investigations or the travel budget to send reporters all over the map. You can only do so much over the phone or the Internet. So the inherent attraction must be something else. I hope it's the kind of idealism we all felt in the days we were knee deep in the hoopla. . .

Down the Shore/Up the Lake

It's summer. Ok, the summer solstice hasn't hit, but anything past Memorial Day is summer here in New Jersey. It's hot, it's humid, the poison ivy is blooming. So, it's time for Jersey Girls to get ready for summer. Pull out the swim suits, beach towels, beach chairs, Coppertone, luminescent pink nail polish, Sun In, and most important, trashy books: tis the season for Janet Evanovich, Martha Grimes, Reginald Hill, Carolyn Hart, Edna Buchanan, Archer Mayor. No serious reading from Memorial Day to what we used to call (before political correctness) Give the Lake Back to the Indians Weekend -- the weekend after Labor Day when the "summer people" went back to The City (New York, but nobody had to say that) and we got Lake Hopatcong back to ourselves. We pretended it was our favorite weekend of the year. We pretended we were happy to see the summer people go. Actually, the summer people were fun, but the traffic wasn't. I kinda miss those days Up the Lake (Like Down the Shore, prepositions are not necessary). Life was simple, full of swimming, softball, Monopoly on rainy days, making ice cream. And books that didn't pertain to school. Well, some things didn't change.

Is Copy Editing a Lost Art?

You can't rely on spell check. It only flags misspellings that create non-words. If you misspell a word and it becomes another word, it's perfectly ok with spell check. As if it weren't bad enough to rely on technology for something a human should be doing, it's just as bad, or worse, to ignore copy editing and proofreading all together. And what is scary, is that newbies to the biz may not realize what they don't know. These are kids who never learned to diagram a sentence. Sure, kids who did learn to diagram thought they would never use the skill, but if you write for a living, it's a good skill to know. When copy was set by a typesetter, there was often another check past the copy desk. The most valuable employee on many newspapers was the typesetter who went to a Roman Catholic elementary school. Nobody new grammar like those nuns. Nuns are far better than spell check.