Newsroom 101, at http://newsroom101.com/, is a collaborative effort by Professor Gerald Grow, Professor of Journalism, Florida A&M University and Tallahassee Democrat editor Ron Hartung. Newsroom 101 aims to instill and preserve “the deskly arts” essential to any writer or editor.
The website hosts free self-instructional exercises for journalists, writers, editors, students and others who want to review journalistic language, as governed by the Associated Press Style (AP) book. These exercises are based on issues of grammar, usage and AP style that arose at a daily newspaper and in a course in journalism.
Although quite a lot of exercises apply only to journalistic language, there are many which apply to the standard English usage. ‘Newsroom Exercises’, developed by Ron Hartung has evolved from the kinds of errors made by journalists and interns working at a daily newspaperand and a toolkit on ‘Grammar and Style Exercises’ has been developed by Gerald Grow for journalism students. A couple of exercises, based on AP Stylebook, is also available on this site and is useful for journalism students.
There are a couple of special sections in Newsroom 101, one of them being ‘If Bureaucrats Wrote Ads’, where Dr Gerald Grow presents some advertising slogans in bureaucratese to help understand the difference between lean, expressive writing and inflated prose. The ‘Redundicide Spray’ section is a humorous visual aid for teachers, editors and writers on reducing redundancy with a touch of a finger! Among the recent additions is a section ‘Choice of the Right Expression’, which explains how to avoid errors while using common expressions and cliches. Nearly all these examples come from student work. Between Oct. 9, 2006 and Dec. 24, 2007, visitors completed 965,860 exercises on Newsroom 101. Now this is a record!
For the exercises to work, you must set your browser to allow pop-ups from the newsroom101.com site. The site is not affiliated to the Associated Press or with the publishers of the AP Stylebook and they are not responsible for its content.
