Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo tops banned words list

Editor's Notes

Our city editor recently handed a list of about 100 banned words to the reporters at their weekly meeting.

First they groaned. Some muttered under their breath. A few argued.

How in the world were they supposed to write about a feasibility study without using the word feasibility? How could they cover a City Council meeting without facilities, mitigations, allocations, implementations and infrastructure? How could they ever quote another public official?

New rule: No sentence will stagger under the weight of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Reporters will throw out all those tired, poor, wretched words, yearning to be rewritten.

Take vehicle, for instance. Why write about a vehicle found in the canal when you can be so much more specific by calling it a car or a pickup? Same goes for juveniles. That’s cop talk: Call them teens instead. And in case you find yourself writing the word utilize, don’t. Trade it for three letters — use.

Every reporter who takes a beat at a newspaper knows that it has its own language to be translated. Sources from school officials to cops, lawyers, politicians, coaches and bureaucrats use languages steeped in jargon, and if reporters aren’t careful, they’ll pick up the same shopworn vocabularies.

Thankfully, some public agencies are starting to recognize the problem. Contra Costa County supervisors, for instance, took a brilliant anti-acronym stand last month and banished alphabet soup like EIR (Environment Impact Report), ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and RFP (Request for Proposals) from all speech and written materials. Only commonly used acronyms such as FBI or BART are acceptable.

Supervisor John Gioia of Richmond said he was inspired by the board of commissioners in Kitsap County, Wash., which fines anyone $1 who uses bureaucratic acronyms. The money goes to charity.

“I think it’s important for government officials to speak in English,” the Kitsap board’s chairwoman said.

In the same way, we think it’s important that people understand what government is up to, so our job at the newspaper is to make what we write more understandable. We need to avoid clichés (like the plague), and jargon (like best practices), which are ho-hum to readers.

So the list of banned words is an attempt to strive for language that’s fresh, never arcane. Strong, active verbs. Meaningful nouns. Rarely used adjectives and adverbs.

If you see any of the following words in our copy, feel free to point them out to us. (Note that this is just a partial list, because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over completely.)

Banned: Action plan, assess, at-risk, benchmarking, capacity, continuum, empowerment, extrapolate, incentivize, initiative, joint resources, leverage, paid personnel, residence, stakeholders, sustained injuries, juveniles.

If you have any nominations of your own, send them my way to add to the banned word list. And if you have any pristine, unsullied replacement words, ship them over, too.

We stand with reporter Judith Miller

Editor's Notes

Some people are having a tough time with the Judith Miller case. They lament that this confrontation between the press and government isn’t anything like the last big fight, the one in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Regrettably, they’re right; this case involves what could turn out to be a political hack manipulating the media and putting a CIA agent in danger — which is a federal crime.

But who is in jail? The journalist who didn’t even write a story. And something’s terribly wrong with that picture.

To give you some background: A former CIA consultant criticized the Bush administration, and, presumably, one or more high-ranking government officials tried to discredit him by telling journalists that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. A syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter wrote the story about the outing of the CIA agent, and a federal grand jury investigating the case demanded the identity of the sources.

Columnist Robert Novak must have coughed up the information, because he wasn’t held in contempt of court, as were Time’s Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, the two other reporters who had received the leak. After a federal judge ordered them to testify, an appeals court affirmed the order, and the Supreme Court let it stand.

Time Inc. then handed over its reporter’s documents to a special prosecutor, and Cooper agreed to testify. Then on Wednesday, Miller, who had promised not to reveal her source, and kept her promise, went to jail.

Journalists are supposed to be watchdogs of government, trained to bare our teeth at anyone who would take away our legal rights and abilities to keep the public fully informed. Unfortunately, on the federal level, we don’t have complete protection, as Miller’s incarceration sadly shows.

Sure, we’ve had more than a few journalists who have abused their privileges and humiliated the rest of us. But we have to ask, as Miller did, “Do you want to hear from authorized government spokesmen, authorized corporate spokesmen alone, or do you want to hear what’s really going on inside an organization?”

In Tracy, we rarely write stories using confidential sources, and we’ve only twice had to fight to keep our reporters from turning into investigators for the government by being forced to give up their notebooks or provide witness statements. But it happens often in Washington, especially with administrations determined to operate in secrecy and federal prosecutors who find themselves threatened more by those who wield pens and notebooks than by what could happen to our democracy without them.

Judith Miller made a personal choice of conscience in defense of the First Amendment and its principles. She stood her ground, and for that, I stand in awe.

When hate comes to town

Editor's Notes

Two weeks have passed since the traveling Westboros burst into town, waving their signs of hatred at our high school graduates and yelling at our church-going citizens.

Thankfully, the picket signs and T-shirts are gone, along with the out-of-town media and counterdemonstrators. Unlike Topeka, Kan., home of the anti-gay Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church for the past 14 years, Tracy can sigh with relief that its residents don’t share Phelps’ extreme wrath.

Two weeks have passed, but we’re still talking about the pickets — and our response to them.

A reader asked why we put a photo of the protesters above the graduates on the front page of the June 13 paper. A school board trustee remarked at the last meeting that the demonstration was a “non-issue” and that we should have covered it as such.

Most people are surprised to know that we debated for weeks how we would cover this spotlight-seeking group. We knew we wouldn’t ignore them, because as journalists, we are responsible for reporting what’s happening. But we didn’t want to overplay — or be played by the players.

At first, we tried to bolster the understanding of what was coming to town with research and learned that the Westboro folks are publicity hounds who know how to get free airtime and newspaper space. In our reporting, we tried to reflect that research — that Phelps’ followers are mostly family members; that they not only target gays, but all Americans; that they rarely spur violence; that 30 extra Tracy police officers and a handful of sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers would be assigned for crowd control during the two days of protests; that counterprotesters would far outnumber the protesters.

We know that it was our original reporting of West High’s Gay-Straight Alliance that drew the attention of Phelps in the first place. And later, when we talked to local ministers, we reported that even the most conservative refused to take Phelps’ side, and that’s what led to the public protests at the churches.

But we didn’t create the Phelps family and its anti-gay, anti-American sentiment. And unlike what one letter-writer has asked of us, we can’t print just the positive news in town; that’s the job of the chamber of commerce.

Still, what’s a local newspaper to do when hate comes to town?

We did what other newspapers do when faced with demonstrations by the white supremacist Aryan Nations or rallies by the Ku Klux Klan. We covered the attention-getting protests and the community’s response to them, betting on the public benefit, and we tried to keep our own biases at bay.

And now we take notes of the lessons learned — that events such as this can provoke individual thought and reveal shared attitudes. That some churches will pass the collection plate to help pay for the extra police protection that the city provided. That the effect of blatant hate can backfire on its instigators.

The Westboro crew got us talking about what was once considered taboo and maybe, just maybe, it brought us closer as a community. And that’s news.

Truth: on the record or off?

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Grappling with all those grads

Editor's Notes

On June 9, 1939, stories in the Tracy Press told how the fire department extinguished a threatening grass fire, preparations were completed for the 16th annual Holy Ghost celebration and the town’s high school seniors received their diplomas. Individual photos of the 95 graduates, with names like Silva, Parker and Bettencourt, appeared on Page 6.

Grass fires still threaten Tracy in the windy city, the Portuguese community still has its annual celebration and high school graduation is still front-page news in the local paper.

But for the first time in 65 years, we aren’t running the photos of all the high school graduates, which amount to nearly 1,200 students, including those from Tracy, West, continuation, charter and private high schools.

I guess you could say Tracy has finally reached that milestone of being just too big.

While some people have said, “I wondered when you’d cut back,” a few parents have expressed their disappointment in our diminished graduation section, which published Thursday. “I can only assume this is a cost issue on the paper’s part,” a parent wrote in an e-mail with her canceled subscription.

It’s never been a moneymaker to print the special graduation section, with its hard-to-come-by content and labor-intensive production. Tracy’s Johnson Studio has always been accommodating and generous, but local photographers aren’t always contracted to take the senior portraits. Yearbook companies are often less than eager to share the photos, while some have gone out of their way to ship us what they had, even from other states.

Then there are the seniors who somehow missed having their photos taken, which can come as a surprise to parents who look for them in the grad tab. And, of course, there’s human error on our part, which has led to mistaken identities and missing seniors.

Most daunting these days is what used to be the easiest: getting the names of the actual graduates, which schools have become more reluctant to release. Last year, a parent actually sued the school district over the list of graduates provided to us — and threatened us for printing it.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t the Tracy of 1939.

We’ve always considered the grad tab to be a community service that required lots of staff and volunteer help. It was a labor of love, not so different from working on our own school yearbooks. Tom and Sam Matthews recall the hours spent engraving all the photos of the graduates back in the hot-metal days of letterpress printing. A generation or two later, my staff will remember shifts spent scanning senior photos, inputting names and trying to match everything together by deadline.

As for readers, I know they will miss the grad tab. I’ll certainly miss my annual search for familiar faces in the black-and-white photos of smiling graduates, just as I miss recognizing people I know in the grocery store.

But I take comfort in the fact that today’s graduations at Peter B. Kyne Field are still newsworthy events. Whole families will fill the grandstands. Graduates will sit on folding chairs under the bright, June sun. Valedictorians will give speeches about looking to the future. Reporters will jot notes into their tiny notepads. And photographers will try to capture the image of a graduate as he throws caution to the wind — and mortarboard into the air.

Thankfully, the pomp and circumstance hasn’t changed at all.