Two degrees of separation

These temperature conversions are totally correct (unlike the ones we were discussing in August): the interesting about them, for keen students of anglosphere media, is not their inaccuracy, but their telltale quality.

The Paris climate convention settled for nice round numbers for obvious reasons – clarity and memorability – when setting its target global warming limits. But it settled for them in Celsius. So in a major anglophone news market with exclusively imperial measurements – in other words, of course, the US – 2C and 1.5C become a much less catchy 3.6F and 2.7F. And for those with a practised eye, seeing them thus in a headline on the Mail website instantly identifies this global-interest piece’s country of origin, as surely as that parade of suspiciously Australian experts discussing heat deaths did last year.

Further down the article, we encounter a few more classic anglosphere problems: the text is resolutely in F, but the appended graphic is resolutely in C,

and whereas the main text has been converting from imperial to metric, the explainer box converts from metric to imperial,

giving the whole ensemble a “product of more than one country” feel.

This is not too difficult in mixed-measurements Britain, where, as we have observed before, we drive by the mile but refuel by the litre, and are fairly agile at switching between the two standards. But in countries where one system predominates, it must feel more alienating when the subject you are reporting about uses non-domestic measurements, especially if the conversions prove infelicitous, or even impossible.

Take – for a very random, recently encountered example – Belgian coverage of the NFL. In Le Soir, the report of this year’s Super Bowl (“un thriller hollywoodien”) by the news agency Belga does not even attempt to translate many of the sport’s terms, and certainly tries nothing so foolish as to introduce the idea of metres to the concept of down and distance.

Here it simply talks of “70 yards” (not even 70 “verges”, which might be one direct translation of the imperial measurement), just as “touchdowns” are that in French too (and even “drives”, albeit in neologism quotes).

Pleasingly, however, the report does use “saquer”, a verb meaning to fire, dismiss or mark someone down, for quarterback sacks. And for a conversion that’s actually better than the original, I love the phrase “passe ‘hallelujah'” for a long throw. Sounds even more exciting than a Hail Mary pass, and it only happened at the start of the second half.

Animal instincts

Shot at by coyotes? As if those wild desert canines weren’t ugly enough already. How do they manage to pull the triggers?

Hang on, though – look at that capitalisation. The Mail’s ear for emphasis, unlike some of its tabloid rivals, is unerring, and if it thinks being shot at is the biggest thing in the headline – not “shot at BY COYOTES” – then all may not be as it seems. In fact, it emerges after you click on the link that the “coyotes” here are human: it’s an American term for the people-smugglers who operate on the US-Mexican border, as the standfirst begins to make clear.

It’s another classic anglosphere news moment – a usage completely unfamiliar in Britain finding its way straight on to the UK homepage via the New York newsroom (just as, at the time of writing, readers of the American homepage are being informed of a former British soap actress’s new hobby of pole dancing, no doubt with a mixture of intrigue and bafflement as to who she is).

Even on the Mail website, though, coyote in this sense is quite rare – a comparative Google search suggests that only about 1,100 articles using the word also contain the word “smuggler”, compared with the 10,000-plus pieces about actual coyotes, the cast of Coyote Ugly, coywolves (coyote-wolf hybrids) and even zombie coyotes (no, really! Well, OK, they’re unwell and prowling around during the day).

It would be interesting to know just how well understood that usage is even in the US away from the southern border states – especially since, a few years ago, it even seemed to confuse President Trump, who spoke in a speech of the need for a border wall to deter “chaos, crime, cartels and, believe it or not, coyotes”.

You’d have thought that “chaos, crime and cartels” would have adequately covered the activities of the human type of coyote without … ? Anyway, never mind. Although given that canine coyotes were already widespread across western north America at the time of European colonisation, a wall would only serve to keep them in, rather than out.

The case of the recurring rowlocks

Another baffling incident in a Sherlock Holmes film and another flurry of newspapers swirls across the screen. BRITISH SUBJECT MISSING ON AMERICAN TRAIN. Hang on, though – haven’t we seen some of these stories before?

In The Woman In Green it was the London Daily Chronicle. In this one, Sherlock Holmes In Washington, it’s the London Beacon. But in both cases the Oxford rowing coaches still seem to be having trouble with their swivels.

The two films are two years apart, so it would seem that these experiments must have gone on quite a long time. (Although, as we discussed last time, this story, which seems to be a real-life one, must date back about 10 years, as swivels instead of fixed rowlocks were coming into vogue by the mid-1930s.)

And as before, a largely convincing-looking paper – much better than standard movie-prop fare – is let down by one item: in this case the Middlesex v Derbyshire match report. Two county cricket teams playing in a Test match? I hardly think so. It’s a good thing Watson, still recovering from the shock of learning the Navy has piled up 428-6 against the Army at Lord’s, apparently missed seeing it on the front page.

Glossed in translation

At the anglosphere-girdling modern Tribune, as regular readers know, the Australian reporters write Australian and the American reporters write American, and we don’t enforce British English anywhere except Britain. But there is one partial exception to this rule and that is for the original Tribune – the print Tribune.

The newspaper takes in reports from all three newsrooms but is only distributed in Britain, and so what was initially written for the understanding of customers in Melbourne or Pittsburgh can subsequently find itself in front of a completely different audience. And if you’re editing it for print, for an entirely British audience, you do have to intervene and translate – sometimes quite intensively.

Take, for example, this piece, filed online in Australia for Australians, and then sent through as-is for print in the UK:

Putting oneself in the place of a British reader, one might find oneself asking:

• Who?

• What’s that?

• What were they?

• Where?

Scott Morrison needs no introduction at all to Australians, but British audiences may need a gentle reminder of who he is. “Federal parliament” is a significant distinction to make in a country that also has state parliaments, but the distinction is probably unnecessary for overseas readers, who will be working on the assumption that only controversies at national level will be making the foreign pages. The five secret self-appointments were the talk of the country at the time, but presenting them like this – in a brief, second-news-cycle way, for people already closely informed – doesn’t sit entirely well 10,000 miles away, where readers may have missed the story. And Cook here is “the Division of Cook”, that is to say Morrison’s parliamentary constituency in Sydney – not a name that will resonate at all with Britons.

So after some British-ising, you might end up with something like this:

I’m not sure if there are any “rules” to this yet, but a few principles, as illustrated above, often seem to apply:

(1) Anything that is too obvious to mention for the piece’s original audience (eg, who Scott Morrison is), may need explicitly putting in.

(2) Any detail obscure enough that even the home audience needs to be reminded of it (for example, the name of Morrison’s seat) may need taking out, simply on the grounds that it’s too much information for an audience already processing a lot of unfamiliarity.

(3) If the home audience is on the second or third news cycle for the story, it may be worth re-editing to take the story back “half a cycle”, so to speak, for an overseas audience – in other words, you may not be able to rely as heavily on readers’ knowledge of prior developments as the home reporter is entitled to.

This might seem like a very traditional kind of editing – spelling things out and putting sentences into British English, damn it – but in fact it, too, is a product of the burgeoning world of anglosphere news. In the old days, when your Australian bureau filed a story, it would have been written for the desk in London, and all the glosses and explanations necessary for comprehension in Britain would have already been added. It’s only now, with unmediated copy arriving from two newsrooms with their own priorities, that the job needs to be done at home base. And at the Tribune, the task seems to have fallen to the copy desk – another small example of how much growing online news organisations need subeditors to keep things running smoothly.

Zeroes and ones, part 6C (43F)

Journalism and maths – the adventure continues:

Although in fact, here the issue is not really numeracy: it’s a more abstract one of conceptualisation – confusing a temperature of 2.5C with a difference in temperature of 2.5C. A sum has been calculated correctly; it’s just not the appropriate sum. (If global temperatures rise by 36F, even air conditioning isn’t going to help.)

And I’m afraid, at the Tribune, this has happened quite often:

It’s not clear why we struggle with temperature like this when we navigate other conversions successfully and, as has been said elsewhere, sub-editors are capable of making much finer distinctions than this when it comes to language. I think it may have something to do with the fact that the zeroes on the two scales are so far apart and signify different things (whereas, for example, 0 mph and 0 kph signify the same thing, and the scales diverge after starting at a common point).

The classic formula for converting an actual temperature in celsius to fahrenheit is

(<temp in C> x 1.8) + 32 = <temp in F>

and it’s that addition of the constant, the 32, that causes the trouble when you are trying to calculate a difference in temperature. If you subtract 32 from all the erring totals (where given) in the corrections above, you get the right answer (or close to it, given some of the original fahrenheit totals have been rounded). So the correct C to F conversion for a difference in temperature is simply

<temp difference in C> x 1.8 = <temp difference in F>

and similarly the other way, for a difference in temperature:

<temp difference in F> x 0.5555 = <temp difference in C>

In such a critical decade for climate change policy, we may find ourselves needing to do these sums more and more often.

With thanks to the Tribune’s chief revise sub for spotting this one – a man who has seen too many improbable-looking pound-to-yen conversions (really, that many zeroes?) to let any figure in parentheses pass unscrutinised.

Going for bloke

It’s on the Mail’s UK homepage, but there’s something very Australian about this story, isn’t there? And the most uniquely Australian thing about it is not the cassowary (which is also indigenous to Papua New Guinea): it’s the presence of the word “blokes” in the headline.

The word is rarely heard in any context in the US, of course, and in the UK, although it’s common, you would never see it in straight news reporting like this. In Britain, it carries a strong overtone of randomness or inconsequentiality – “some bloke”; “that bloke over there”. It’s almost dismissive; it would invite you not to care much about the people to whom the news had happened.

In Australia, however, it means something quite different: the “Aussie bloke” is a national idea, a recognised type, familiar from cultural exports such as Crocodile Dundee. As the academic Andrea Waling puts it, a bloke is “white, straight, able-bodied, and good for a laugh. He is practical and good in a crisis, but generally laid back. He rejects individualism in favour of loyalty to his mates.” In this context, “bloke” is not a denigration but an invitation to identify with the protagonists and sympathise. They are good sorts, Everymen, authentic Australians: people just like you or me, and just as likely to be out of their depth when being chased by a 100lb bird with a blue face.

Up until now, this blog has been discussing these constant collisions of anglosphere news dialects as a three-way “clash of equals” involving British, American and Australian English, but now I’m starting to suspect it’s even more complicated than that. For example, this piece of copy appeared in the Tribune subs’ queue a couple of weeks ago:

Because the story had arrived from the Australian website on its way to the UK print edition, it had already been edited, and there in blue (ie, already deleted) was the word “dairies”. Dairies? It seemed wrong, obviously, but also such an unlikely mistake to make in the context of cigarette retailing. What could the writer have meant?

In fact, a bit of Googling revealed that it wasn’t a mistake at all: this story was filed to the Australian newsroom by our correspondent in New Zealand, where the term for a corner shop/7-11/convenience store is, indeed, a “dairy”. But this usage is not even understood in Australia, so the sub in Sydney had changed it, hours before the copy found its way to London. I did one or two bits of de-Australianising elsewhere for UK readers, but beneath that work there had already been a process of de-New Zealandising that would have been undetectable to anyone outside the Tribune.

This prompts the thought that beneath the “big three” flavours of anglosphere news English, there is also an overshadowed hierarchy of others. At the Tribune, in addition to New Zealand correspondents filing to Sydney, Canadian reporters file to New York and South African writers to London. What is happening to idioms and expressions common in these countries and present in copy, but processed at regional offices elsewhere before being published to the world? Presumably, as in this case, they are ending up on the spike. We have previously floated the idea of British, Australian and American news eventually merging into one, but, if it ever happens, it may have to wait until six or seven flavours of English have been flattened into three.

Nouvelle vague

Vagary is back! By which I mean not in its traditional sense of “foible”, but in its rare, possibly-on-the-brink-of-emerging sense of “vagueness”. We spotted it three years ago in a record review that was even then several years old, and at the time it appeared to be a one-off variation. But the other week, what should appear in the Tribune’s copy queue but this:

Given that the speaker is talking about the clarification of certain issues, it seems clear that what she means by “vagary” is not “aberration” but “ambiguity” – not a definition that has found its way into any dictionary, even though you can appreciate how easily it can be formed as a noun out of “vague”.

And not only that: here’s two more in the wild, from a film review lamenting the generic quality of Hollywood remakes compared with their foreign-language originals:

Here again, “foible” or “whim” make no sense in context, but “imprecision” makes perfect sense.

Now that “vagary” has actually appeared in the subs’ queue, we are confronted in real life with the issue we wrestled with hypothetically the first time, which is how to handle it in copy. I’m not sure it’s anywhere near being understood in this new sense with that spelling, and, as we discovered three years ago, even “vaguery” isn’t widely accepted, even though that might be the best choice for etymological clarity and fidelity to the speaker.

In the end, I went with “vagueness” in square brackets, even though square brackets are the editor’s last resort:

This blog does not like to make too many usage predictions (although it remains confident of the eventual collapse in distinction between “not to be overestimated” and “not to be underestimated”). But if people seem to be discovering a neologism all by themselves like this, with no obvious high-profile precedent, you do get the sense that a new word might be coalescing into being. One to watch.

Made in Chelsea (Vic.)

Good arvo! No, wait – wrong antipodean reference. Avo on toast? No, not that either. This AVO is another piece of uniquely Australian life that slipped through the geofence a few weeks ago and on to the Mail’s UK homepage – an Apprehended Violence Order, or restraining order, which can be applied for in alleged cases of domestic abuse. And that’s before we even contemplate “farewell” as a verb – unheard of in Britain but a common feature of southern-hemisphere English.

Two unexplained regionalisms in the same celebrity headline? It’s just another day on Planet Anglophone News. More recently, a “finance pro” – albeit this time explicitly “from Sydney” – has saved $158.55 (presumably that’s Australian dollars) with some thrifty tips.

But as you read to the bottom of the article, you come across a plain factbox, unnervingly universal in tone, suggesting you “bring your own water” to the airport. Best of luck with that in the UK and the US, where bottled drinks have been summarily removed from carry-on bags at security for the past 20 years.

Now, of course this time due notice of location has been served at the top of the article. You can’t put the word “Australia” in every paragraph, and nor should you if you’re trying to be taken seriously by an Australian audience. Nonetheless, one does flinch slightly at consumer advice that suits only one country being broadcast across two other continents.

What to do? Last week, regular reader Paul had a suggestion: “Perhaps one answer is to have datelines on every web story, as on news agency feeds,” he writes. It’s a thought: and it is something that the Mail currently succeeds at better than the Tribune. We have remarked before that the Mail’s bylines could be larger and a less pale shade of blue, but they are at least some signal of location: “Reporter X for Daily Mail Australia”, or, more gnomically for the US, “Reporter X for Dailymail.com”.

Every media organisation likes to advertise where their foreign correspondents are stationed in the byline. But the arguments against having true datelines, specific to towns and cities, on home news stories are well rehearsed in Fleet Street. National papers shouldn’t be boasting about reporting “from Doncaster”, as though wanting congratulations for catching a train to Yorkshire, and if one were to specify where every single story were written, an embarrassingly high number would be datelined “… in London”.

Also, as Paul observes, it might not always solve the anglosphere problem either: “Australian coverage, especially when place names have been transplanted from the UK, can cause initial confusion until you realise the story is about Newcastle, New South Wales and not Tyneside.” That’s true: it could also be tricky reporting from Ipswich (Queensland), Harrogate (South Australia) or Chelsea (Victoria). But, as a policy, it might be worth a try.

The three-newsroom problem

Vienna – “Austria’s capital, Vienna” – is the most liveable city in the world, and the Tribune is all over the story. Global news, global news organisation: it’s the perfect fit. Except that, no sooner have we announced the winner than, one paragraph later, we’re straight into a controversy about … Auckland.

Now, Auckland was last year’s winner by reason of its strict lockdown, and now it’s 34th for the same reason, which is interesting. OK. But two brief paragraphs about Vienna later, we move on to … Melbourne. Melbourne came tenth.

Then we address Australia’s other major cities, none of which are in the top 25. Finally, at paragraph seven, we get to a brief rundown of the six European cities in the top 10.

By paragraph 11, we’re back on the subject of Melbourne, with a quote from the premier of Victoria,

and you start to suspect that, just possibly, this global-interest story about all the world’s cities was filed by the Australian office. The byline tells you only that the article is by “Staff and agencies”,

but the dateline reveals a launch time of 2.43am, British summer time – approaching 10pm for the US office, which is day shift only, but 11.43am, right in the middle of the working day, down under.

The Tribune has three fully fledged newsrooms: London, New York and Sydney. The demerits of having a trio of autonomous operations running in parallel have been rehearsed at length in this blog, but of course there are merits as well. For instance, live blogs and big rolling stories in one country can be kept alive all night and into the morning by the other two offices; as a natural consequence of the time zones in which it operates, the Tribune never sleeps now. Quality of coverage may dip a little as, say, London reporters wrestle with the snakepit machinations of Capitol Hill, but breaking political news at 5am EDT will be up ready for a breakfast audience across the US before the baton is handed back.

In these circumstances it is instinctively understood who the story “belongs” to, and which are the senior and junior newsrooms in each case. There is also a clear, if slightly troublesome, policy about whether you should write local news chiefly for a local audience in each jurisdiction: the answer is yes, even if those stories sound a bit baffling to readers abroad. The three-newsroom problem that we do not seem to have addressed yet is what to do about stories of apparently global relevance where all the interest will in fact be local, and vary according to where it is being read.

Last year we discussed the Sydney-bureau story about heat deaths around the world in which all the experts quoted were Australian. This story has a further problem: despite introducing antipodean figures as though they were familiar names, it also tries to adopt a slightly tortured citizen-of-nowhere approach to the geography (“Switzerland’s Zurich”, “fellow Swiss city Geneva” and so on). London, the Tribune’s home and headquarters, is not mentioned until the 18th paragraph. The same is true of New York (or, as the article calls it, “the US city of New York”).

A conscious attempt at impartiality mixes with the subconscious desire to find relevance for the home market, and for two-thirds of its audience the story jars. But it’s hard to believe that writers in New York or London would, or could, have approached it any differently.

And that leaves us with a suggestion that defies efficient planning and good internet practice, but seems to make the most journalistic sense: if you have three newsrooms, are there in fact some stories that you need to cover three times?

On repeat

(Warning: graphic content and links to graphic stories)

On the Mail homepage, next to a piece about an OnlyFans model’s “eye-popping assets”, there is currently a video playing of a man being blown up by a sea mine. Filmed by a surveillance camera from long distance, it shows a wide, empty beach in Ukraine on a sunny day, suddenly punctuated by an explosion at the water’s edge and a dark upsurge of sand.

There is no graphic content warning. The video autoplays when the site loads and repeats, so if you have just popped in to read about Coleen Rooney’s new bikini in the sidebar, your eye is constantly caught by the tiny figures of the man’s wife and son, running along the beach some way behind him and then stopping in shock – a three-second snuff movie looping over and over again. If you are trying to read the advertising feature immediately to the right about putting up garden bird feeders with your children, you may also notice the standfirst to the video, which tells readers that the explosion “scattered the 50-year-old’s body parts across the beach” as his “distressed” family looked on.

Twenty or so years ago, in the wild-frontier days of Web 1.0, there used to be a website that specialised in horrific news and paparazzi photographs that no one else would publish – the remains of suicide bombers after detonation, car accident victims in extremis, and so on. Covering itself, supposedly, with the mantle of documentary veracity, its tagline was: “Are you ready for real life?” But that was a small, dark corner of the old internet that wasn’t prominent on the search engines of the time – not a vast news site also eager to keep you updated on a “flash of bronzed legs” and capital gains tax on second homes.

In the unmoderated comments below, meanwhile, readers – no doubt all genuine Mail-reading yeomen of Middle England – are dismissing the video, which was supplied by Odesa regional police, as propaganda relating to the row between Kyiv and Moscow about the mining of the area. “Why would Russia with their mighty Black Sea Fleet want to put mines in the Black Sea?” writes someone listed as coming from Birmingham. “It would have also been Ukrainian since Ukraine seems to not anchor their mines in place very well,” writes Doug, from Sudbury. The Tribune is discreetly offering counselling to the picture editors who are processing the many explicit images coming out of the war, but that seems to be less of a problem for the commentators. “Photo of body parts please – need proof!” writes Dobby from the United Kingdom.

Even if this dispassionate panel of experts is right, in a sense it’s irrelevant: the point is that the Mail believes the video is real, believes it shows a death, and has thought it suitable to place, rewinding unstoppably, on the same page as a jolly read on bedroom turn-offs.

It would be easy to conclude that this bewildering collision of sensibilities is a byproduct of digital imaging and internet culture: a modern-day phenomenon that would have foundered on the gate-keeping and laborious production methods of times gone by. But tabloid tastes go back much further than that: consider the picture-papers of the 19th century, which ranged from respectable to publications such as the Illustrated Police News:

This edition, from September 1888, features the Whitechapel murders – that is, the Ripper murders – in a manner familiar to readers 130 years later. There is blanket coverage and an abundance of queasy detail. The twin tabloid tides of prurience and outraged respectability surge and ebb, between the savage man brandishing a knife and the women demurely holding up their self-defence weapons. They do not have a close-up photo of Annie Chapman as a corpse, so the artist has drawn one instead. There are even more pictures than you’d find in a modern Mail article. And, just for contrast, at bottom left we have “exciting scenes at the menagerie”; in the best desensitising tabloid tradition, there’s a cute animal story right next to the serial killings.