What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
pudo.org
pudo.org
A lot of wire copy already includes metadata, but it's generally just in a header that accompanies the story.
What I was envisioning was something more like what is being proposed for the semantic web:
<name id="1394">John Smith</name> was elected president of the <organization id="2315">New Castle County Council</organization> on <date value="2014-12-10">Wednesday</date> at the <place lat="39.685881" long="-75.613047">county headquarters</place>.<source id="23" name="Mila Jones" title="New Castle County public relations officer"></source>
I also wanted to use the metadata to help copy editors trim wire stories:
<priority value="1">This amounts to de facto resegregation. <priority="4">(And we all know how we segregation worked out the first time.)</priority> If the school district still values integrated schools, it must act swiftly to correct this effect.</priority>
It turns out, though, even when you create a UI that lets reporters and editors easily plug in this metadata without having to understand XML, they are not apt to fill it in, because they are just so overworked as it is.
Plus, in order for this to work on a larger scale, you'd have to get an incredible amount of buy-in. You'd have to get reporters and editors to agree that it's worth their time. You'd have to build software to support it. You'd have to get all of the different media companies out there to agree on standards.
It's just ... not what the media industry is (or should be) focused on right now. They've got bigger things to think about, like how to find a viable business model.
http://www.nltk.org/book/ch07.html
http://stanbol.apache.org/docs/trunk/components/enhancer/nlp...
This last one was actually trained on WSJ content: http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/freeling/index.php?option=com_content...
At this point, though, I'm thinking it'd be the equivalent to spelling and grammar suggestions in Word, appreciated somewhat but ultimately considered useless the first time it screws up. But still better than nothing, right? ;-)
<priority value="1">This amounts to de facto resegregation. <priority="4">(And we all know how we segregation worked out the first time.)</priority> If the school district still values integrated schools, it must act swiftly to correct this effect.</priority>
Worse are authors whose writing has no excerptable lede. Gina Kolata and mumber Morgenstern (health / Well articles in the NY Times) especially do this.
I find some old-school journos -- Dan Gilmore particularly comes to mind, I've called out a few others in G+ posts -- still practice strong ledes and heads. Many newer ones start with "My latest at <some website somewhere> read more".
Which ... tells me fucking nothing.
Lede with your lede. Trail with your link or call-to-action.
I've also noted that it's become pretty much standard practice for news bureaus to write single-sentence paragraphs. Literally, every sentence of a story is its own paragraph. I don't know when that became standard practice, but sometime in the later 1990s or 2000s, particularly as stories moved online.
I think there's too much insularity within much of the journo community. But many of the newcomers are also subject to outside influences which call their credibility strongly into question. Lack of uniform copyediting, for better or worse, means a wide range of writing quality.
Though I'm seeing that even in long-standing brands -- NY Times, Forbes, and elsewhere.
I imagine it, and most users would still not care. They skim articles anyway.
This is actually potentially a big part of that. People are reading more than they ever have—it's just not necessarily newspapers that they're reading.
Any stats on that. I agree people are reading more than ever but disagree that they're not reading newspapers (online). I think they are, they just aren't paying for it anymore.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/are-online-ads-more-valuabl...
I have to say, for me as a journalist in tech, the one thing that ends up taking the most time in my stories is looking up name spellings and people's titles, and most importantly, trying to figure out if your freaking company is spelled TheCompany, The Company, or Thee Cmpany or some crazy variant. You startups and your mid-word-capital-letters. The bane of copyeditors everywhere.
Agree about the problems coping with company and product titles, etc. The problem could be reduced by refusing to play that game, eg by using registered names rather than marketing styles or logos.
Nailed it. I'm a developer in a newsroom, and I'm dealing with flack just asking them to write a non-automated teaser text for their blog posts. They can't be bothered.
To be honest I'm surprised services like those aren't automatically used on new content within every major media outlet as a standard.
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html
It's actually a lot easier than you'd think, because thanks to Zipf's law pretty much every article in these evergreen topic areas is using the same set of 1,000 or so facts. And these facts mostly come from the same set of government or NGE reports, which are updated at most once a year, and often only once every ten years.
The cool thing is that you can then use a javascript snippet to track which facts are being used in which documents, automatically mark facts as outdated when they change, etc.
the people want to be entertained, and unless you can show how this entertains them, you'll have a hard time getting past their resistance to change.
I can't be bothered to look for it right now, but the NYTimes did a behind-the-scenes look at their CMS probably a year ago.
EDIT: Ok, never mind, I looked for it: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-int...
Also there was never really any implementation that failed per se, I actually still think this would work. I'm just currently spending my time on other stuff that I think has more potential. For the last several years this has been kind of a hobby project that I work on here and there whenever I get burnt out on whatever I'm supposed to be doing.
The main problem with it is that it just takes an enormous amount of time to add new content. Any given fact can easily take an entire day to add... By the time you go through all the competing claims, find the the primary sources, read through the methodology for each one, etc., that's easily 8 - 10 hours per fact. Which is why there still isn't any code or UI even after multiple years of work.
C.f. comments on Peter Thiel's graph of the year...
Not to nitpick, but I looked up a single random article, namely http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#parenting, and Wikipedia says its not that simple:
"An attempt to replicate this study in 5934 8 year old children failed: No relationship of the common C allele to negative effects of formula feeding was apparent, and contra to the original report, the rare GG homozygote children performed worse when formula fed than other children on formula milk.[5] A study of over 700 families recently found no evidence for either main or moderating effects of the original SNP (rs174575), nor of two additional FADS2 polymorphisms (rs1535 and rs174583), nor any effect of maternal FADS2 status on offspring IQ.[6]"
I actually looked at that wiki article, but probably before that was added. And that's a good example a fact that had some editorializing on my part, which I ultimately want to eliminate. The original idea was to give context to facts, but I think it would make more sense to create a metadata format to do this, e.g.:
- To understand this fact, you need to understand X, Y, Z.
- This fact is needed in order to understand facts X, Y, Z.
This way facts can live and die on their own, rather than being bundled together according to the tastes of a single curator.
The website was originally supposed to be an annotation site like rapgenius - and I have already spoken to people at LyricFind who would give me a license to use their entire database of songs!
But then I thought it could go much further. First of all, you could release a bookmarklet and browser plugins that would let people mark up websites for others to see. Each such mark would have its own associated discussions etc.
But we could go even further. We could source facts and debunkings of claims. We could in fact build a graph of dependencies between claims and give people a way to assess their truth value. In this way we could for example have a discussion of varios religious claims once and for all, and any visitor would see what other claims they depend on. I thought, for instance, that Coca Cola invented the modern image of Santa Claus as wearing red. I was wrong.
Snopes, Politifact, etc. could all be sources. Something like facebook posts could definitely use this bookmarklet.
So do you want to findmeaning.in/The-US-Constitution? Or findmeaning.in/Pokerface or findmeaning.in/Book-Of-Jubilees?
If you want to help me build it, drop me a line.
PS: Also I find it really valuable to have a followup after a news story has faded, eg to see if that kid facing life in jail for hash brownies got off (he did).
Awesome!
Journalists value the sensational over the factual, and work hard (true) to tight deadlines.
So they already do not care about the tech features promised, namely indicating:
* there is not enough evidence to make a given point
* a certain person or company has not been investigated thoroughly enough
* a certain point is not relevant
[edit: data points]
Cut'n'paste obituary from Wikipedia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/03/wikipedia_obituary_c...
"Hack": A self referential term journalists use for each other in the UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_writer
Definitely, we'd have to look at the studies in this space, namely whether journalists cite their facts, or write their pieces using citable studies/facts, etc. So I also won't accept the OP's statement of it as fact.
Though, in my, supposedly biased, opinion I'd say journalists are quite adept at twisting facts to suit their points, and also of omitting (i.e. cherry picking) facts that support their views/points.
"Journalism" is a broad tent. I suspect there's plenty of room for tools like this one.
Programmers value the hacky over the elegant, and work hard to tight release cycles.
And yet there are programmers who care, and who seek out and use better ways of doing things, including the tools to help them. Just as there are journalists who care about getting things right, digging up and exposing the truth.
In fact, a great way to lift the general standard is to make the right way of doing something also the easy way of doing it: better tools can counteract short deadlines and occasional lapses of discipline.
No, people do. There are tons of highly professional journalists who want to do good work and write important, well-crafted, accurate stories. Who were inspired to get into the field by Watergate. Who are constantly begging their bosses to do labor-intensive features.
The economic reality is that there are not enough people who want this enough to fund it, except barely at a handful of institutions like NYTimes. Good work takes time and manpower and it doesn't sell. If management is doing its job (maximize shareholder value) then it is doing everything it can to turn its paper into Buzzfeed.
There are thousands of journalists who left their dying papers because they couldn't stand it anymore. Thousands more who were simply laid off, or took buyouts because they saw that they were going to be laid off if they didn't. My dad is one of these. They'd want nothing more than to work at a real paper again, but there aren't really real papers anymore.
Being sloppy and fast is absolutely about service to the customer. With a daily publication deadline, you can generally take the time to do it right. But the readership (and therefore management) wants stories on the internet as quickly as possible. Of course they are going to be sloppy.
(I agree with all your complaints about TV news, because that's what it's always been. In print... that's what they were forced to become when the money became tight.)
I'm personally interested in this question: What if coders had design tools as powerful as those used by architects and construction engineers?
I wrote a blog post about this recently: http://blog.neonto.com/?p=44
My suspicion is that neither I nor other journalists I know would use this newsclip.se tool. In a single newsroom I've seen people using Word, TextEdit, Google Docs, Notepad, BBEdit, Gmail, phone-based email clients, phone dictation, and even emacs (me, a few times) to write news articles. While the CMS is newsroom-wide, the writing and editing processes tend to be very personal. Journalists also tend to be individualistic and dislike being forced to use a standardized system without clear benefits.
Where something like newsclip.se might be beneficial would be as a kind of preprocessor/lint for the CMS. It could do a lot of what's being described in the linked article but without replacing the entire journalistic stack.
Rather than attempt to link evidence to statements, which, if we're being honest, doesn't really bring us closer to the truth since many "sources" are merely other people's words, it was much simpler: identify weasel words, euphemisms, or use of the passive voice. Between these three features, I think that most factual writing could be improved a colossal amount.
I would certainly appreciate an easier way to keep track of claims, citations, evidence, and interplay between a story's moving parts, though. I think that the article mentions a few tools which work toward that goal admirably. Right now, to make a really bulletproof piece, you need to be extremely scrupulous with self-identifying your claims and then providing written explication of evidence or hyperlinked evidence.
Additionally, it'd be really useful to have a tool which kept track of sentence structure and also allowed you to track logical rhetoric by keeping track of "If this, then that" style statements.
This is probably asking too much, though. A final hurdle is that journalists and writers tend to be old-school when it comes to technology, so it might be a hard sell to the older segment of that market.
A lot of good software engineer I know prefer lightweight editor like the good old Vim or SublimeText over IDE like Visual Studio, Xcode or Eclipse. That's because when you write complex code your brain is slower than your finger and the syntax and structure of the language you are using is something under your skin, you don't need to think at it.
So, no, great coder doesn't use powerful editors, if they can chose they use very simple one with the minimum level of features they need to help them think faster (syntax highlighting, autocompletion, indention) and stop. All other features of complex IDE are a disturbance rather than an help.
I don't know what a good journalist need but my guess is that they have the same problem, their brain is slower than their finger and the grammar of the language they are using should be well known. I don't know which tool they use, but in my opinion a simple text editor with a minimal spellchecking system (but not correction) well integrated with the publishing process is more than enough.
From an Innovation point of view I'm usually suspect when someone claim to have an innovative tool for an established industry. If the industry is established the actors have already optimized their tools and if there could be an improvement is very small. What usually happens is that something changes in the industry and make the actual tool obsolete (e.g: a new process or a new technology became available). But if you want to create something really innovative, you have to find this change. Simply bringing something existing in a field in a different field rarely works. And if it works is because you have a really good understanding of both fields.
Sometime I cringe when I watch a developer using a lightweight IDE, missing so many obvious syntax errors that they're not going to realize until they go to compile or run their code. So many wasted workflow cycles.
I work on large codebases and I know that I don't have the mental capacity to hold the entire structure (object interfaces, app structures, third party library usage) in my head. It's great that I can offload this task to my IDE and concentrate on the problem I'm solving instead of getting disrupted by having to think about code mechanics.
On a side note, I think it's funny that people like to consider vim a lightweight IDE. All the good vim coders I know of make heavy use of plugins to get the exact same features a full fledged IDE has.
The things about IDEs that suck productivity wise is that instead of just giving you all the things you do want (syntax, highlighting, autocompletion, indentation) they provide bloat that doesn't make a task faster to do but easier to. What I mean by easier is putting GUIs on top of command line tools and APIs. A great coder looks at all that GUI cruft and thinks, many what hell is the underlying API or CLI tool I can use instead and get rid of all this middleware crap that is probably full of bugs. Someone who is not comfortable with that instead leans on those GUI tools because they don't really want to understand what is going on under the hood, they need the wizards and the text boxes, drop downs, and such to make it easier on themselves.
With that said, there is a value in having an editor that can actually understand your target language all the down way to the AST level. That's how you can get nice things like reliable refactoring without having to use grep, sed, and friends. Or with detecting syntax errors and such, and even though the VIM plugin system is doing great there can definitely be more innovation in that space (and there clearly has been lately). But let's just leave out all the Spring XML file builders and Tomcat/Jetty container managers and focus on the code.
Says you, and your anecdotal evidence/experience. Sounds to me that you have more prejudice against "complex" IDEs than you do actual facts. Would countering your points by telling you of the countless bad "coders" I've worked with that use text-editors instead of IDEs convince you to change your mind? (I'm going to stop using your term 'coders' here) Or the absolutely great programmers that I've seen that use powerful IDEs to supplement and augment their abilities?
Do you write in a compiled language that can provide rich intellisense, or something more like Ruby/Python/bash that is a tad lacking in that department?
But good coders still need powerful tools, just lots of tools, rather than one complex one. Simple and powerful are orthogonal.
I disagree that established industries have already optimized their tools. That's just blatantly untrue in real life, and for good reason. The tool makers always have the best tools. A journalist can't make a better tool for journalism without learning an entire new career (and tool making requires more experience than average as well, beginners don't make good tools).
Buzzfeed has the most advanced CMS, but their reporting pales with respect to the NYT. When they do bother to do proper reporting (McKay Coppins, etc) they get excellent stories - the rest of the time they use filler, because it's cheap to produce.
Buzzfeed is definitely pushing this a little bit, though I do think they have a bit too much baggage to get far enough with it.
(PS. If anyone wants to help tackle this problem, we're hiring @ Cafe: http://cafe.com/careers)
My impression though, is that what makes great journalism is reporting. Almost all the time, when I'm reading a great article, I do so using readability to strip away all the crud and just end up with the text in a decent size and no pictures/hyperlinks/movies.
Yup. At the end of the day, I think in-depth textual reporting does rule. But what tech can do is make that great reporting slightly cheaper (and thus more plentiful/viable).
Edit: I also need a job soon and am applying to write for Cafe!
And because people read filler because it's easy and unchallenging.
Here are a couple of suggestions that I could use if you're looking for feature requests. Most of these things exist in one place or another, but having them integrated into a one-tool workflow would be awesome.
1. Some kind of crowdsourced reputation system for sources (i.e. medical journal sites have high reputation, naturalnews.com has low)
2. Auto cross-referencing between articles based on content.
3. TODO list management
4. License-aware relevant image suggester (please!!!) This alone would be a killer feature for me. Pick out topic words and search selected image sites, then give me thumbnails to choose from.
I wrote this in another comment, but a tool like this already exists: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... and has for about a decade. I drop all my blog posts in Devonthink Pro, and I'm often surprised by the connections that emerge.
(I vaguely recall him mentioning that on his app even)
Basically, they don't know there's a better way. They're used to hacking through Word's track changes, and they always have a deadline to meet. That doesn't leave much time for improving your toolset.
Also, many writers have very idiosyncratic workflows. From what I gather their education and workplaces focus more on the craft of writing well, regardless of whether it's with a pencil or a keyboard. Whereas it's hard to contribute to a codebase without being exposed to version control.
Certain writers do. It just depends on the domain. For book writers, there are tools like Scrivener. For screenwriters, there are tools like Final Draft. These tools help tremendously with auto-formatting and version control. They also keep track of things like characters and settings, presumably by assigning them to certain classes and IDs "under the hood." (I've never looked under the hood, but I assume they are XML-based.) They are fantastic tools for the writers they're made for. They're also fairly WSIWYG, and do not require writers to know anything about markup languages. That's pretty key, because many writers are not technically proficient. (Modest technical proficiency, at the very least with HTML and some CSS, is probably going to become a requirement in the future...but I digress.)
For journalism, however, Word is the default—and obviously, it has its strengths and its weaknesses. Wonky changelogs and substandard version control are two of the biggest. Some editors at some publications are moving over to Google docs, for the superior versioning and collaboration capabilities. But Google's editor doesn't offer the robustness and feature set of Word, and it's unfamiliar, so a lot of editors and writers are reluctant to adopt it. Personally speaking, I much prefer Google to Word when it comes to working with my editors. I'll gladly take in-doc comments and version control over emailing Word docs back and forth, any day of the week.
At work (http://cafe.com), I've actually been working on something similar with our CMS (Monsoon). We're trying to use technology to make telling cohesive online narratives a lot easier.
Interestingly, one of the biggest hurdles so far has been in decomposing stories. Media traditionally treats each story as a big blob of text (in most cases, HTML), but we're trying to change that so that each story is actually just an arrangement of smaller tidbits (we call them droplets). Switching to that model helps us to encode a lot more semantic information, and also to reflow stories effectively for context.
We're not yet to the point where we integrate/suggest droplets from other stories automatically, but that's definitely the goal. Maybe we could integrate something like Newsclip.se to encourage that.
(PS. If you want to help us get there, we're hiring: http://cafe.com/careers)
It just seems as if the intended audience wouldn't have the faintest idea what an IDE is.
What is the relationship btw the version of newsclipse that's running as a demo online and the repo:
https://github.com/Canvas-Hackathon-Teams/Newsclipse
It seems to be the same - is that where I get a copy to run locally?
Not much would change, except more fluff.
What journalists need is a money making, sustainable outlet.
After a year of coding on Visual Studio, during writing I would say something like "As mentioned in previous chapters, the decision was based on..." and then just click on "previous chapters" and press F12, expecting to be taken to the original reference.
Unfortunately I found out Word does not offer such functionality just yet
hNews is a microformat for news content. hNews extends hAtom, introducing a number of fields that more completely describe a journalistic work. hNews also introduces another data format, rel-principles, a format that describes the journalistic principles upheld by the journalist or news organization that has published the news item. hNews will be one of several open standards.
http://microformats.org/wiki/hnews
I learned of it (yesterday) re-reading Readability's Article Publishing Guidelines:
https://readability.com/developers/guidelines
hNews is an XHTML microformat -- the tags are entity names and classes added to standard HTML entities.
Key among them are: hnews, hentry, source-org, dateline, geo, item-license, principles.
Other microformats, including hCard, can be used to identify people, companies, and organizations, similar to vCard properties. The elements will be familiar to those who've worked with address, Active Directory, or LDAP data: fn, n, nickname, org, email, tel, adr, and more.
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
An IDE that tied into these (or, possibly, other standards) could be useful.
You'd likely need some sort of natural-language processing in the copyediting or publishing process to apply this uniformly. Field reporters may work on a wide range of equipment and software (including pen-and-paper or simply voiced-in reports). And expecting reporters to incorporate tags into their copy is likely a stretch.
Scrivener comes closer than anything else I've seen to meeting the OP's goal.
The actual reason is more often Save the Cat by Blake Snyder: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw...
"Yet once you know the formula, the seams begin to show. Movies all start to seem the same, and many scenes start to feel forced and arbitrary, like screenplay Mad Libs. Why does Kirk get dressed down for irresponsibility by Admiral Pike early in Star Trek Into Darkness? Because someone had to deliver the theme to the main character. Why does Gina Carano’s sidekick character defect to the villain’s team for no reason whatsoever almost exactly three-quarters of the way through Fast & Furious 6? Because it’s the all-is-lost moment, so everything needs to be in shambles for the heroes. Why does Gerard Butler’s character in Olympus Has Fallen suddenly call his wife after a climactic failed White House assault three-quarters of the way through? Because the second act always ends with a quiet moment of reflection—the dark night of the soul."
Most shows and film will be mediocre. But you don't have to watch the dregs - you only have to watch the best of the best! And by the measure of good things being produced, media has never been better.
This is my tactic. I have a television, but it's not actually connected to an aerial or a cable box, just my Apple TV. I only watch television shows when it's clear they're excellent and exactly to my tastes, and it's brilliant :)
Some elements of this are good.
Others result in mind-numbingly formulaic writing.
I don't think that an IDE model makes sense because writing in human language is more complex and nuanced than programming languages, which are more limited in scope. At the end of the day, IDEs are shims to match human desires to the language the machine expects.
I'm not a journalist but I do a lot of writing, and I actually use a program called Devonthink Pro in the manner described here by Steven Berlin Johnson: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2005/02/devonthink_cont.h... . It's surprisingly close to the tools Lindenberg is describing.
As a former journalist, I think that http://hypothes.is will become another very important tools for reporters... It's an annotation layer for the Web.
* Your weekend newspaper would come out on Wednesday.
* There would be new editions many times daily... not with new stories, just corrections of the first edition, which was blatantly inaccurate and partly written in Moldovan.
* Every day, the newspaper would be in a different format which didn't fit the newspaper rack you just bought.
* Every week, the newspaper would get bigger, but contain no more content (just a new font). You would regularly be forced to buy a new newspaper rack.
* Also, once a week the paper boy would break into your house and steal your old papers. He would offer to sell them back for you in the new format, for a higher price.
* Also, the newspaper rack sellers would not let you store newspapers of which they disapproved.
* Rather than telling you about the world, the paper would track your behaviour and tell the world about you.
* Once a week, the front page would be 404 NEWS NOT FOUND.
* Reporters would be paid high six-figure salaries, but would be unable to relate or talk to anyone but other reporters.
* Many journalists would consider themselves brilliant, world-changing geniuses, with plans not just to report on government, but to replace it.
* At the same time, they would have secret deals with those governments to report people who read "subversive" news.
* et cetera...
As linguists say, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Whether 'Moldovan' is its own language or simply a regional dialect of 'Romanian' is entirely a question of politics.
You've been refuted in the very comment thread you've linked to, lol.
Romania has existed as 4 smaller states [0] for a very long time, inhabited mainly by a people descendant from the native Dacians[1,2] and the colonising Romans. Moldova, the geographical region, was one of these states.
Romania's steps towards unification:
* in 1601 Michael the Brave manages to unify all Romanian principates, albeit very briefly
* in 1881 Walachia and Moldova unify by electing the same leader
* Transylvania is added to the mix after WWI
* because of our initial German allegiance in WWII, we lose half of Moldova (now the Republic of Moldova) to Russia
The point of my short, not that accurate history lesson is that Romanians and Moldavians are the same friggin' people, that had the same language for many, many centuries. Even if the language in the Republic of Moldova would've diverged significantly since WWII (which it has certainly not), it would still be merely a dialect as opposed to a different language. Romanian and Moldavian are less different today than e.g. German and its Austrian dialect are (hence why Moldavian is called a subdialect [3]).
> As linguists say, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Whether 'Moldovan' is its own language or simply a regional dialect of 'Romanian' is entirely a question of politics.
Don't believe most elections/referendums from Moldova. There's an acute Russian influence in the Republic of Moldavia, manifested as both systemic brainwashing of older/poorer people, and control over politics and economy, and that's corroborated by the systemic electoral fraud (also present in Romania today [4,5] – sigh).
(Moreover, rumour has it that Russia has armed forces conveniently stationed not too far from the border with Moldova.)
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Romania#History
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia
2: http://www.daciagroup.com/en you might have heard of this (don't buy them though, they're cheap for a reason)
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldavian_subdialect_of_Romania...
4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_presidential_election,...
5: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ro&tl=en&js=y&prev...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldavia
bonus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Romania_and_Mold...
* The newspaper would advertise job openings for reporters with "5 years of experience writing in Moldovan" as a requirement. Reporters that list experience in "Romanian" are arbitrarily culled from consideration. Despite the requirement, 100% of the newspaper is written in English.
* The newspaper had a correspondent in Moldova about 3 years ago, who also wrote in English, and that section of the new job description was blindly copied from the advertisement for his replacement, a position which was actually cancelled after 4 weeks, for "business reasons". The newspaper loudly complains about a shortage of qualified reporters. They don't mention that the candidate that they interviewed rejected their offer for its ridiculously low base pay.
* The reporter job is eventually outsourced to Moldova. Readers wonder why the local police blotter has so many Andreis, Tanyas, and Nicolais in it, and begin to worry about the Russian troops quartered east of the river.