A Quick Look At: Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual

This will be anything but professional, and hardly in-depth.

A while back now, I may have mentioned that one of my video ideas was to talk a little bit about a pair of style guides or manuals from when I was an undergrad student working on my bachellors degree in the late 1990s. Since I'm not getting to that as quickly as I'd like, and it's been a while since I've posted anything here, I figured I might as well take a brief look at one of them, in this case, the Associated Press Stylebook that was one of the ones that was required for the reporting classes that I needed for the journalism degree I was going for at the time.

As I was saying before the jump, this will be anything but professional or in-depth, so I would recommend against putting much stock in what is said here. This is just me talking about what I remember from using it for classes I took twentysome years ago at this point and glancing at it again as I was writing this post.

If and when I finally get to making the video I keep mentioning, I'll try to include things I get from whatever response I get to this post.

The bulk of the manual covers spelling, capitalization, and other usage information as it related to style and formatting of articles for newspapers and other such organizations affiliated with the Associated Press, or AP for short. The next most substantial portion of the book is, as the title suggests, explains how the AP at least used to advise avoiding libel, which the book simply defines as injury to reputation. Other topics covered include photo captions, the Freedom of Information Act, and filing to the wire.

One thing I don't recall it saying much about is the Internet. This makes sense, as the copyright date on this thing is 1998. Back then, the Internet as we know it today was only in its earliest stages at best, with the wire services being more prominent than they may be today. I could, of course, just be talking out my ass here, because I really haven't kept up with this stuff as well as one might think.

What I remember of the classes, there were a handful of them, though I only remember the name of one: Public Affairs Reporting. I'm sure there were more than that, but I've forgotten what they were over the last almost 25 years now.

There are some style choices and decisions I use when I write these blog posts that I'm sure I picked up in those classes. Chances are, most of them don't show, at least not directly. I'll try to remember to run a hard copy of the, well, copy, if I must get technical, I wrote for this post in my word processor and try to explain and show where it might be in the manual when I get around to making the video.

There are also other memories that I'm leaving out of this so that I'll have something to actually talk about then, too. Part of the reason for that is that I've already gone on for almost a page, and that may be a bit much for my intent here.

So anyway, until next time. Hopefully, less than a week away.