GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Beware who you criticize and for what, for you could be next in line! The last laugh is on me, after poking fun at headline writers who are too rushed to reread what they have written. I just published this: “Thieves caught robbing Nyon train station safe”.

A minute later I happened to reread it on the published page and realized it sounds like they made a safe getaway. Not so! Here’s the corrected version: “Thieves caught robbing safe at Nyon train station” – and they are now behind bars.

A growing number of readers of news are reading fewer and fewer words from articles, with many of them never making it past the headline, so I repeat my argument that getting these right matters.

Which reminds me of one I’ve been chewing over since I read it in the Irish Times and then the BBC the other day, a reference to “the worst recession in memory”.

I’ve been trying to work out whose memory we’re referring to, or if this should have been the more popular “in recent memory” (google that and you’ll start to see what it means to use a clichéd phrase) or perhaps “in living memory” in which case who is the oldest person alive who can share personal memories from the Great Recession of the 30s?

The Guardian had a twist on it, which makes more sense than the others: “Ireland’s love of print can survive the worst of recessions” / This is a small country of 4.5 million but these are people who buy newspapers.

Headlines at newspapers used to be written mainly by young writers starting out in journalism who were given the job as a kind of proving ground. Today, most journalists write their own headlines, and these should be better.

Sometimes we get it wrong, though, first time around.

I love concise writing. So the idea of the new Ted books, from the people who do the amazing Ted conferences, has great appeal. The starting point is excellent: ideas worth spreading. And the length of the books is just right, at under 20,000 words, for what they describe as “long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.” I wish them well, while I debate which one to try first.

I have MinnPost writer David Brauer to thank for this one, an article on the big words most commonly looked up in the dictionary by New York Times readers. His source is the Nieman Journalism Lab. Both are worth your time.

I’ve been having discussions with GenevaLunch reporters and writers about the extent to which you can get away with using big word, whether writing without them is dumbing down or just being clearer. You can argue for the richness of language, the beauty of simplicity, clarity (with or without big words) or sheer orneriness and you’ll find someone who disagrees with you. I try to argue that with so many readers for whom English is a second or third language we should strive to keep it simple. Big words are also a bit like those unpleasant speed bumps in the road, when you’re reading online.

That said, big words online are easy to look up. The main reason is that you can type the word into your search engine without even bothering to add “definition” because the words are so rarely used that the first examples of them are from the online dictionaries. Try “sisyphean.” I wonder if looking up words in dictionaries will remain a sisyphean task for those of us who bother.

Happens to all of us, a moment of distraction and we write it’s instead of its or red instead of read. But this headline made me really curious about the story behind it, with visions of delicious if messy cheesecake to clean up: Giant cheesecakes brakes Guinness Record.

Jargon is just another way of keeping people out, a kind of fence that doesn’t allow the hoi polloi (translation: the masses) into the halls of power. You prove you’re one of those with the keys by learning the jargon. Here’s some of the jargon from advertisers and public relations people in this morning’s electronic inbox – and these are the people who are supposed to be good at communicating with a larger public, counseling companies on how to sell their goods?

From a TNT press release: “TNT, the global express company, launched its new global strapline entitled ‘sure we can’ reflecting the company’s ‘can do’ mentality. Furthermore, TNT launched its new Express and Group websites, which are the first touch points that will carry the new strap line.”

Translation: new slogan, new signs.

[update: check out copy editor definition at The Slot]

Editor’s note: Ellen Wallace is speaking 26 25 June in Geneva on "Leveraging your online life," a GWIT (Geneva Women in International Trade) presentation open to the public.
New bosses, old lovers, clients and your children: what will they learn about you on the net? Leverage your internet profile, make it work for you – learn to manage
the hazy border between professional and private in the online world (click on image to view large).

The world still needs copy editors, but it can’t afford them: this is the message I get from New York Times editor Lawrence Downes, in one of the newspaper’s most popular posts of the day. I agree. The author blames the fast-paced world in which news is manufactured today, largely thanks to the Internet. We can’t change this, and few of us in the news business would like to return to pre-googling days. However, there is a quality loss and it matters. There’s also the problem of accuracy and the Internet.

I worked for several years for Time magazine, where fussy fact checkers forced reporters to doublecheck everything or pay the price late Friday night when the magazine was closing for the week. Copy editors traditionally checked individual stories, but also the way a group of stories appeared. They would help avoid problems such as the list of headlines that appeared yesterday on CNN, with "Lakers sink Boston" wedged between one headline story on floods in Iowa and another on floods in Sichuan.

For my part, despite my own reputation as a persnickety editor, errors slip in because no one is proofreading what I write. We all need editors to see things with a fresh eye and ask questions. I recently wrote a feature about the iris garden at the Chateau de Vullierens, a name so easy to misspell that I forgot to doublecheck the spelling of gardener John Ruttledge’s name, and I left out a "t". As a result, the story didn’t appear if you googled his name, although you did find a story that appeared in Swisster about him, some days after our story. That alerted me to my mistake, which I promptly corrected but it took Google another four days to catch up with the new version. Word to the wary: if you google the wrong spelling you’ll still find that Google lists the story, with the mistake.

Separate Google lives

Once on the web, mistakes are like children who’ve left home: they lead their own lives and you lose your control over them. I try to be conscientious about our responsibility to get information right because others find it on the web and use it.

Media mistakes on the web

GenevaLunch is small, but today, copy editors are a luxury for most news organizations and it shows. A trainee working for me some months ago found a wrong figure about the economy in Le Temps, the most reliable paper in this region. She refused to believe it at first, asking how they could let such a slip occur. A typo and no proofreader, I suggested. More worrisome is sloppy reporting that no one catches, so that when squatters were protesting in Geneva last year the Tribune wrote that there were 500 people while Le Temps said 100, citing the police. The list of incorrect headlines and information I come across in any month is very long.

And what about your own reputation on the web?

So what is the solution? I think it lies at home and at school: insisting that we all become critical information consumers and take responsibility for the correctness of what we pluck and share from the Internet, to start. If we get our news from social networks, do we pause for a minute to ask, "is this right? Is it true?" Do we complain that journalists will write anything, but then rush to pass around to friends what we read by an anonymous source about a football or music celebrity, taking it as probably true? Take it to the next step: you. If you didn’t complain when a photo taken of you at a party where you had a bit too much to drink was posted online, and get it removed, that’s a bit of maybe-truth about you that’s wandering around the Internet. Even a good copy editor can’t help you at this point.

And don’t forget the difference between it’s and its, while we’re on the subject of mistakes.

Amid the wreckage caused by one wild person with a gun in Virginia yesterday, the loss of a word might seem like small change down the drain. But a curious thing happened when all the e-mail alerts and messages and media reports began to fly around America, talking about the nightmare underway at Virginia’s Polytechnic University. We used to talk about gunmen – the BBC was still doing it today. But all of the US is talking about the shooter.

Shooter? That used to be slang for a gun, and was sometimes used to talk about drinks, then it had to do with drugs. A thriller came out by that name in March and maybe that’s why a whole generation suddenly talked about a guy going berserk with a gun and called him a shooter. Wikipedia hasn’t even had time to catch up.

Maybe it’s an improvement to talk about what a madman does with something rather than what it is he has in his hand, which on its own is pretty harmless. Even if guns are designed to shoot, they still need a person to do the work.

It’s a strange "community" phenomenon that every student anywhere who was interviewed or posted or wrote seemed to be using the word "shooter." I don’t think I’ve seen a better sign of how fast people this age talk to each other. There must be a bright side to this, somewhere.