James Robert Kelley

While an English professor would see declining grammatical quality in blogs and text messages as a major offence, the public is generally accepting.  My posts tend to be written within a couple minutes and may be a shining example of stupidity.

While illiteracy is common, until recently a typo or other error in a newspaper would have caused a major reaction.  The quality of newspapers transitioned into online articles, with Associated Press articles reprinted on Fox News, CNN and other websites.

Recently even the old media in the new world has started to slip.  Each day for the last several days I have noticed omitted words, misspellings and even place holders intended for additional information slipping past the editors.

The decline in quality could be related to the TXT’ing generation moving into the media, but I think the problem is a symptom of a general shift in business.  I assert bad apples were always in the pool of writers, but the editors were a strong bunch who could weed out the errors.  Recently editors have taken a sideline to rapid delivery of the news.

An example of rapid delivery would be news articles related to volatility in the stock market.  I watch the up and down motion of the market via Google Finance.  Google Finance lists articles that appear to have been posted near shifts in trading.  While this can be very handy to get perspective on what is changing throughout the day, it causes the news sources to be quick to post.

An example of real-time news reporting failure at the moment of writing.

These quick posts often become outdated before they are published.  A typical article will explain the market is down, while the market is making a quick recovery.  When the writers rejoice over a major upswing in the market, the real-time quotes will show major losses.  The speed of change and the inability to accurately report on real-time events renders any real-time analysis pointless.

My opinion is the real-time reporting is not news, but more of a sports announcer talking in delay.  I suggest the news industry would better serve their readers if the writers would take a breath and report the news only after there is something to report.  This would allow the writers to reflectfully dig deeper, and give the editors something to do again.

I’ve been thinking about Yahoo! turning down an offer from Microsoft, and could not understand why they would refuse an offer that was probably overpriced. The only thing I could come up with was pride, they didn’t want to sell out to Microsoft.

Now I have another theory: stupidity. Google has been running the world of Search, largely due to their team of Ph. D.’s and unusually strong thinking. You never see anything dumb coming out of Google. Yahoo! on the other hand shows a lack of engineering understand in a graphic that is supposed to show the workings of their new strategy:

Do you see the problem with this graphic, located on the Yahoo! Developer Network Home? Spin an internal gear the the whole thing comes apart! How can you expect a company with such lousy engineers to know a good deal when they see one?