Um, what? It's a brand name. Either you render it correctly, or you don't; there are no typographic decisions to be made unless you're committed to mangling it in the first place, right?
Um, what? It's a brand name. Either you render it correctly, or you don't; there are no typographic decisions to be made unless you're committed to mangling it in the first place, right?
This article is a lamentation that the journalistic style guardians didn't hold the line.
Here's William Safire's 1997 take on the issue, alluded to by Crain but not linked:
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-na...
I'm for camel case as a necessary evolution: there are so many similar names, and name collisions, that anything that lets someone try to be distinguishable, and anything that might make two words fit together more distinctively than if paired any otherway, deserves a chance.
"the new FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk..."
If a writer takes this literally, a copy editor has to tone it down or else the brand name will dominate the article text and make it look like an ad, too: "It's a Frisbee." Fun variants include meaningless alternating caps, or a single lowercase 'i' inside an otherwise all-caps word.
Newspapers want to use the brand name, not the logo or an ASCII attempt at one; and in decades past, fixing the caps helped comprehension rather than hurting it. They considered capitalization part of presentation, not content. (Shouldn't a brand name survive an all-caps typeface?)