You can’t be too careful with stock photos.
One wonders how much time the Birmingham City Council – of England – has spent actually out and about in their own city, after the council authorized and issued a brochure bearing a picture of Birmingham – Alabama.
The British city fathers tried the old “we were just looking for something generic” excuse, but that sounded pretty lame, given they were praising their citizens for recycling efforts. Surely they had a nice shot of their town someplace?
It’s a cautionary tale for those of us who use stock photos. Consumer Reports readers often point out instances where the same stock image has been used for similar, or even competing, products and services. I know I have seen the woman in the center probably 10 times over the past few years, advertising jewelry, cosmetics and face lifts.
Some years ago, at another company, we were asked to do a story on a client’s newest acquisition – a mortgage processing firm. The acquisition’s corporate brochure had a cover photo of those lovely Victorian homes in San Francisco known as “the Painted Ladies.” Upon close examination, it was clear there was a guy in his Fruit-of-the-Looms standing in a window. We never told the client, since the brochure was dumped right after the acquisition.
For the sixth consecutive year, American Spirit, the magazine we publish for the Daughters of the American Revolution, has been honored with a Grand Award of Excellence from the APEX Awards organization. The Award was made for the May/June 2007 issue. The same issue also collected two Awards of Excellence:
Two other Hammock-published magazines also earned Awards of Excellence.
American Spirit’s Grand Award was one of only six made in the “For Profit” magazine sub-category. This year the Apex Awards judges evaluated 4,479 entries including 837 in the Magazines & Journals category. A total of 120 APEX Grand Awards were presented in 11 major categories and 1,393 APEX Awards of Excellence were presented in 110 individual categories.
When the night has come/And the land is dark/
And the moon is the only light we’ll see …
The opening lines to Ben E. King’s classic song “Stand By Me” describe the situation American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan face every night when their enemies are on the move. Fortunately, the U.S. leads the world in night-vision technology, which helps deny the bad guys their would-be invisibility cloak.
“Magazine” originally meant a storehouse for supplies — especially weapons and ammunition. So magazines held a variety of things in all shapes and sizes. For most people today, “magazine” means a periodic publication filled with — you guessed it — a variety of items in all shapes and sizes. Today, small is the new big.
Editors kick the word “style” around a lot. Like spoken Chinese, what we mean often depends on the context and inflection. We work diligently to create and maintain style in its various meanings, but like all rules, style sometimes improves when you break it.
Sometimes style refers to a publication’s “style guide.” Ours is based on the Associated Press stylebook, but customized for different clients. For instance, our clients tend to treat elements like titles, dates and state names in different ways:
The point is that every publication has its own set of style rules for consistency in spelling, grammar, even the tense used in attributed quotations.
Then there are times when “style” refers to the overall voice — some call it sound or tone or feeling — of a publication. The style guide can have an effect on this:
For instance, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal use titles before names. So one reads about Mayor Michael Bloomberg on first reference, then Mr. Bloomberg thereafter. The tone is more formal, not so much deferential as polite. Quite different from, say, Rolling Stone.
It’s a common mistake, and one that slipped by me recently, to describe the firing of three volleys of 7 rifles as at military funerals as a 21-gun salute. It’s not.
A 21-gun salute is fired by pieces of artillery, not by rifles. According to the Navy’s History Division, “Today, the national salute of 21 guns is fired in honor of a national flag, the soverign or chief of state of a foreign nation, a member of a reigning royal family, and the President, ex-President, and President-elect of the United States. It is also fired at noon of the day of the funeral of a President, ex-President, or President-elect, on Washington’s Birthday, Presidents Day, and the Fourth of July. On Memorial Day, a salute of 21 minute guns is fired at noon while the flag is flown at half mast.”
The rifle salute can be described as a “three-volley salute”.
What seems to confuse so many folks is that civilians tend to think of a rifle as a gun – whereas gun has a more precise meaning as a piece of artillery.
Warriors have always struggled to find uniforms that provide both protection from the elements as well as from enemy arms. Solutions have ranged from the bronze greaves of Achilles’ armor before the walls of Troy to the colorful garb of Louisiana Zouaves to the bulky battle uniforms seen on the cover of the new issue of Semper Fi, the Magazine of the Marine Corps League.
Though not as heavy as medieval armor, today’s battlefield attire and accompanying gear can add up to 150 or more pounds to the average Marine’s 163 pounds. Much of that is in the form of composite armor plates designed to stop a supersonic bullet or red-hot shard of shrapnel. Add to that eye protection, fire-resistant uniforms, weapons and ammo, communication gear, rations and water, and it’s a wonder the Marine can move at all.
Headline writers are like diners at The Old Country Buffet – they go right for the good stuff, and you’d best not stand in their way. There is no pun, no quibble, no stretch or rhyme or reason, no shaken-and-stirred metaphor they won’t resort to in their quest to stop readers dead in their tracks. I know: I’m Bill, and I am a headline writer.
I wasn’t always this way, although the underlying fascination with groaners and shaggy dog stories was there from the start. When I worked as a reporter and later editor at the late Nashville Banner, the copy editors appended most of the headlines to our articles. They sat roughly in an inward facing square near the city desk, and we could hear them murmuring and often cackling amongst themselves as they clarified our prose and debated zinger headlines.
There were many – and many that did not make it into the paper. Such a one was proposed for a wire story about a woman who had murdered her husband and stuffed his carcass under the house. “I’m walking the floor over you!” sang out a merry voice from the copy desk, convulsing the entire newsroom. The one headline I remember as the all-time greatest was about a grisly local murder whose perpetrator tried to cover up with arson: “Headless body found in gutted church.” If “Wayne’s World” had been out then, we would all have salaamed in appreciation.
But since assuming editorship over various titles at Hammock Publishing, I had to get into the headline business. Turns out I have something of a knack for it, and my colleagues sometimes ask me to swot out a headline for them.
[After the jump, read more about the joys of headlining.]
On some level of course, America’s Marines don’t really need an introduction. They’ve been protecting our shores for more than 232 years. But because they are, famously, “The Few …” there’s a lot about becoming and being a Marine that most Americans never see. To correct that, the United States Marine Corps has launched a broad-based community and public relations campaign designed to give the rest of the world more insight into what it takes to be a Marine. A centerpiece of the campaign is a new TV spot that was taped at locations across the country, featuring the Corps’ legendary Silent Drill Team. A companion Web site, OurMarines.com, documents the video shoot and collects stories about Marines and their families. The site also contains an extended version of the TV spot.
One of the photos from the making of the commercial, taken in Columbia, TN, a few miles from Hammock Inc.’s Nashville offices, graces the cover of the March-April 2008 issue of Semper Fi, the Magazine of the Marine Corps League, which we publish for the League.
Elsewhere in the issue, we encounter a different “kind” of Marine – one made of plastic and aluminum and electronics. The Marines and other services increasingly use robots to perform highly dangerous tasks such as reconnaissance, investigating potential explosive devices, even retrieving wounded comrades under fire. While there is not now and never will be a true substitute for boots on the ground, ‘bots will take on new and more complex tasks as another weapon in the Marines’ arsenal.
Speaking of that arsenal, the Marine Corps League co-hosts three trade shows a year that bring active-duty Marines together with military suppliers. The Marines are not shy about giving the vendors (many of them veterans) a quick and incisive analysis of their products. And the vendors hustle to fix, upgrade and adapt their products and services to meet the warfighters’ needs. Semper Fi reports on the Marine West Expo in January aboard Camp Pendleton, CA; we’ll be at the next one, Marine South at Camp Lejeune, NC, in early April.
Less than two years after tornadoes battered my home town, Gallatin, Tenn., narrowly missing our house, a wave of storms swept through Tennessee and again brought death and destruction to my neighbors. The twisters with their distinctive freight train roar passed farther from our house this time, as I watched TV and listened to weather radio from about midnight to 2 a.m today (Feb. 6).
They hit a community called Castalian Springs, named for a spring near Delphi in Greece. It’s a pleasant little area, populous enough to have its own post office but still a rural stretch more crossroads than village. It also had a historic stagecoach inn, Wynnewood, that many folks have spent years restoring.
I should say they had their own post office – the tornado crushed it, along with numerous homes, and also heavily damaged Wynnewood. At least 7 people died in that area, and police shut down State Route 25 that connects Gallatin to Trousdale County to search for more victims. Like the visitors to that ancient, ambiguous Oracle at Delphi, the folks in that community are searching for answers amid the debris.
The storms then moved east, striking Trousdale County and its main town, Hartsville, and then Macon County and its principal town, Lafayette (we pronounce that La-FAY-ette.). Lightning apparently touched off a huge fire at a natural gas pumping station in Macon County – I heard the glow could be seen in Nashville. Nobody knows yet how many people died or were injured in these areas, although there were estimates of as many as 20.
I’ve been to and through those areas, often for a previous client of Hammock Publishing, Sumner Regional Medical Center. They’re pretty and rural and inviting to folks who want to have big yards and safe places to raise kids; places that have been farmed in some cases for generations by the same families; small businesses such as lip-smacking meat-and-three restaurants. And, jarringly, the abandoned concrete carcass of a never-finished TVA nuclear power plant.
Having seen up close in April 2006 what tornadoes can do, I can tell you that pictures simply don’t convey the extent of the damage. To stand in a neighborhood that once held apparently solid homes and be surrounded by piles of rubble – often higher than the roofs of those houses – makes one feel very vulnerable, and at a loss as to where to start. I grieve for my neighbors and share their feelings of loss.
