Meet the
Watchdogs

Charlotte can tell you the plural of emoji (it's also emoji), whether to use OK or okay (OK) and why journalists don't refer to postal carriers as "mailmen." She appreciates journalists who know when to "look it up!" in the Associated Press Stylebook as a way to express industry standards.

While Journalism has been — in some remarkably progressive ways — open to women as a viable career choice for more than a century, it also often relegated female journalists to certain beats or topics that tended to limit what they could do in the field, like the "society" or "fashion" beats. That glass ceiling was especially solid at the management level of newspapering. Charlotte Curtis, for example, was promoted to Op-Ed Page editor at The New York Times and became the first woman to be listed on that newspaper's masthead ... in the mid-1970s. The New York Times, for context, was founded before the U.S. Civil War, in 1851, meaning that for roughly 120 years, men ran The Times. Curtis, who started on the "society" beat at The Times about a decade earlier, broke through into management with her focus on timely news and high-quality writing. She led the newspaper's opinion pages for about eight years, before succumbing to cancer. This Charlotte 'Dog is a tribute to her.

Chester is a different 'Dog than the rest. He has a Public Relations perspective on the journalistic publishing process and thinks about how sources can best speak the language of a journalist through information prioritization. To use his talents effectively, paste a draft press release into the text box and release this hound.

Journalists often call people working in Public Relations "flaks." The history of that nickname takes some twists and turns, but the straight-line understanding follows the word "flak" (an abbreviation for German anti-aircraft gunfire) and a piece of protective military gear that soliders slip on before going into battle, called a flak jacket. PR specialists often have to deal with hostile questions that journalists fire at them in a barrage, which leads them to be considered a company's "flak catcher" or "flak," for short. Our inspiration for PR 'Dog Chester is Chester Burger. The historical Chester started as a page for CBS and, after serving in World War II, became the country's first TV news reporter. He later started a PR firm and became an active supporter of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, earning commendations from the United Negro College Fund, the Black Executive Exchange Program, and the Public Relations Society of America. Our Chester 'Dog approaches PR in an ethical and straightforward way, helping to identify what parts of an organizational story that journalists will find the most interesting, and also developing approaches to telling that story to journalists in ways that speak their language, increasing the likelihood a journalist will pick the story up and share it with a larger audience.

Didion is the kind of 'Dog who reads dictionaries for fun. She can create a portmanteau for any occasion. She keeps her subjects and verbs close and her verb tenses even closer, in alignment. She is displeased by linguistic ambiguity. But she enjoys the playful parts of the English language as well.

You might be catching on to a New Journalism theme with the inclusion of both a Wolfe and a Didion 'Dog in this mix, because there is one. Joan Didion started her writing career at Vogue magazine, after winning an essay contest, and spent decades thereafter writing nonfiction and fiction, journalism and non-journalism. Above all, she was a detailed and deliberate writer, finding inspiration in grammar, for example, and its "infinite power," she once wrote, adding, "To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture."

This journalist is good at math, really good at math. She wants to help all number-challenged journalists to make sure that whatever stat or other quantified piece of data being circulated by their sources stands up to external scrutiny. In other words, no more free passes on 1 + 1 = 3.

Our knowledge of prominent female mathmaticians begins with Hypatia, who also was an astronomer and a neoplatonic philosopher, intent on preserving Greek culture and thought in Alexandria, Egypt, around 400 A.D. She shared her knowledge of numbers openly and transparently, as she did her religious beliefs, which led to her murder. But before that tragic end, Hypatia arguably was the most respected and beloved math nerd in the known world. Our 'Dog Hypatia is intent on spreading the love of numeracy far and wide through journalism and making sure when journalists use math, they use it right.

McLuhan knows what it takes to catch an ear or an eyeball, with his recommendations for journalistic podcasts, videos, photography, charts, etc. Every story starts as an idea. Every idea can be expressed in any medium. The medium, McLuhan argues, makes the message.

Our 'Dog McLuhan is named for Canadian Communication scholar Marshall McLuhan, who helped to pioneer studies of mass media, and in particular became interested in medium studies, or the studies of how the medium, as he famously put it, is the message. McLuhan later expanded his thoughts on the subject to explain that the medium provides its users certain affordances and constraints different and distinct from another medium, which helps to distinguish one from the other. An affordance is some opportunity that the medium provides, and a constraint is some limitation the medium has, which is why reading a novel, which has affordances of depth and length, never is exactly the same experience as watching a movie, even if that movie is based on the book, or about the same subject matter. In a journalistic sense, sometimes a story can express different parts of itself in powerful ways better through photographs than audio, for example, or better in text than video. At the idea stage, a journalist not only can think about sources and documents and a writing style that varies from "breaking news" to narrative. The journalist also can decide if the story should be expressed in photos, audio, video, data visualization, etc.

Murrow wants to understand who's talking about the topic. He is well-connected with the people in the know, and he mostly is concerned with the quality of a story's sources. He especially appreciates the triangulation of independent authoritative sources.

Edward R. Murrow bridged the hard-boiled journalistic style of the early 1900s with the novelties of emerging mediums in the mid-19th century during an illustrious career that coincided with the establishment of both radio and then television as news mediums. Murrow became an international celebrity in both. Murrow's radio reports from London during World War II became legendary, particularly during the Blitz, always kicked off with his signature opening line: "This is London." As television gained traction and audiences nationally and internationally, though, Murrow transferred his talents to the small screen, creating a show called "See It Now" that addressed the most controversial issues of the day, including the Red Scare by Joe McCarthy. As a Watchdog, Murrow makes sure the journalism provided is nothing to sniff at.

Occam has a nose for flabby prose. He sniffs out unnecessary words, awkward phrasing and meandering paragraphs. Once he gets his teeth into your text, he will teach you about ways to make more direct, efficient and engaging sentences. Space jam? Call on Occam.

William of Ockham (or Occam) was a Franciscan friar and a scholastic philosopher in the 14th century who created the Law of Parsimony. His assertions essentially argued that, in most circumstances, simpler is better. A simpler explanation, a simpler process, a simpler structure, a simpler organization, and even a simpler sentence is preferable to a more-complicated one — as long as nothing critical is removed during that razoring process. While this razor idea should not be absurdly misinterpreted to mean everything complex can be viewed simply or compressed into a simple form, the law instead asks intellectuals to thoroughly identify and cut out all extraneous material in their thing, whatever that thing is, and then evaluate what's left at the core of the situation. Occam's law was predated on this topic by Aristotle, who said, “The more limited, if adequate, is always preferable," and Ptolemy, who said, "We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible." But Occam's version of the thought has been the most straightforward and simple, hence its power, which even Albert Einstein echoed, when he remarked, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Our 'Dog Occam embodies that philosophy.

The Hawaiian language, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, is the indigenous language of Hawaiʻi. Poni will help to make sure that any words that appear from the Hawaiian language in your texts have the appropriate diacritical marks by teaching you about the language and the markings.

In the early 1900s, the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, had a beloved mixed-breed "poi" dog named Poni that she always kept nearby her in her Washington Place residence in downtown Honolulu. In Hawaiian, Poni means "coronation." As a Watchdog, I am named in honor of Poni, and I hope you think of me as a trusted friend, who always is available and ready to help you to communicate properly in the Hawaiian language.

Thomas wants his journalism to make sense ... scientifically. So he carefully reads the data, the findings and the interpretations to ensure it is all accurate. Specifically, he wants validated scientific facts, logical consistency and verified units or measurements.

Dr. Thomas Hurtut, my research colleague in the Computer Science department at Polytechnique Montréal, wondered if our Journalism Watchdogs could help journalists do a better job communicating science. He helped to develop the backend procedural approaches that this Watchdog takes when analyzing and responding to a text, so I named it in his honor. Thanks, Thomas!

Wolfe stands out from the pack due to his deep reporting efforts and stylistic writing, pepping up any piece of narrative with zippy verbs and an active voice but also through the recognition of a storyʻs characters, settings, dialogue, and descriptive passages.

Tom Wolfe was among the leaders of the New Journalism movement in the 1960s, which challenged the perception that journalism could not be as writerly as fiction. Journalists, Wolfe argued, could be wildly creative storytellers, too, developing characters, dialogue, scenes, and even undercurrents of symbolism in their narratives, as long as they held tightly to what was factually true throughout. This novel approach radically changed the way that "literary" journalists — such as Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, etc. — approached their craft. In this vein, our Watchdog Wolfe seeks out that sort of “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" style that forces readers of the work to sit up and take notice that the writer of this piece is no ordinary hack but instead an author who deeply cares about words, the way Wolfe cared about the words.