Many people today believe the news industry is loaded with political agendas, run by people with axes to grind, and an industry which has fallen into mediocrity. Newspapers across the country are in trouble.

In 2004, the Dallas Morning News terminated sixty-seventy staffers, mostly in the newsroom. Some were nationally recognized columnists. The Journal Register company which owns twenty-two daily and 346 non daily newspapers may be at risk of bankruptcy according to an article in The New York Times, published April 5, 2008.

A March 31, 2008 article by Eric Alterman in the New Yorker, “Out of Print, the death and life of the American newspaper,” stated, “Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.”

The internet has been blamed for much of the newspapers’ demise. However, maybe the public is fed up with an inferior product. Perhaps the newspaper people should reexamine their role in society. Perhaps newspapers should report the news in an unbiased professional way with correct facts, grammar, punctuation and fewer sloppy errors.

In my last two years of college I worked on our campus newspaper. At that time, I wasn’t interested in the editorial content or the news content. I was interested in paying tuition and feeding my family. Therefore, I became the advertising manager. And while most of the other student journalists received $2.20 per hour and were limited to working twenty hours per week, I received a ten percent commission on all the advertising I could sell.

Occasionally, the editor had to add extra pages because of the volume of ads I had sold. I didn’t get rich, but I earned more than the serious journalists on the staff, most of whom wanted to graduate and save the world through their reporting.

One of our young reporters once said, “I don’t care if I report the facts. I want to make people think.” That attitude, rampant in the media today, and the increasing factual, grammatical, punctuation and other sloppy errors may have finally caught up with what, for generations, had been a respected profession.

As an old story goes: a small town judge had the publisher of the local newspaper brought into court and threatened him with jail for an article critical of the judge’s handling of cases. The newsman reminded the judge, “You may own the jail, but I own the ink and I buy it by the barrel.” In other words, the media has the final word.

I recently sent the following to the Dallas Morning News in response to an article in the Business section giving tips on how to update a résumé for people over fifty:

Since I am over fifty, I found Bob Moos’ article, “Résumé nip and tuck,” (DMN, Business, April 10, 2008) to be interesting. But, I wonder if he would hire a journalist who sent him the recommended résumé format since it contains no complete sentences, only “short, snappy summar(ies) of the writer’s strengths”, such as, “Creative problem solver with excellent written and verbal communication skills.” That statement doesn’t demonstrate those skills.

And then I read the following on page 4E of the same issue, “The crowd usually shows up around midnight or 12:30 pm.”

A few days later the editor of the Letters section sent an email stating my letter was a finalist and would probably be published within seven days. Attached to this email was the following copy of my letter:

Since I am over fifty, I found Bob Moos article , Rsum nip and tuck, (DMN, Business, April 10, 2008) to be interesting. But, I wonder if he would hire a journalist who sent him the recommended rsum format since it contains no complete sentences, only short, snappy summar(ies) of the writers strengths, such as, Creative problem solver with excellent written and verbal communication skills. That statement doesnt demonstrate those skills.

And then I read the following on page 4E of the same issue, The crowd usually shows up around midnight or 12:30 pm.

I immediately responded to the editor:

Thank you. However, the copy of my letter below does not contain the proper punctuation as it was sent, such as the accent over the e, apostrophes indicating possessive words and quotation marks. Does your letter submission program not recognize punctuation?

I then called the editor and asked her about the punctuation problems, thinking it would be a grotesque irony if I criticized the writing in her paper with an improperly punctuated letter. She told me that the computer does sometimes drop characters.

A few days later in a story regarding American Airlines, again in the Business section of the Dallas News, the following appeared, “American will be reducing its flight capacity this year, the corporation said as it reported a $328 million loss for the three months that ended March 31."

The story continued on an inside page and nestled within that story was a related piece, by the same writer, giving the comments of American Airline’s CEO responding to American’s current situation in the marketplace and the proposed merger of Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines, which would drop American Airlines from the largest airline to the third largest. The writer states, “But that's not what is worrying American, Mr. Arpey told investment analysts as parent AMR announced a $328 million first-quarter profit.”

Seven days have passed; my letter has not appeared in the Dallas Morning News. I assume the editor was offended by my questions regarding the punctuation and decided to pull the letter. Or it may be she knows the story of the judge and the publisher. After all, the Dallas Morning News owns the ink. I just wish it would use the ink correctly.

Jim Terry has worked in Republican grassroots politics for 40 years. Terry was an administrative assistant to a Republican elected official in Dallas for twenty years. In 1996, he ran for and was elected to Justice Court 2 in Dallas County where he served eight years.

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