I Am Not a Journalist, So Sue Me

It's interesting to sit in a room full of journalists and not be one. There are about 250 people at this convention, and I bet 98% of them work with newspapers. Tonight at the dinner buffet I sat by a woman who works for a magazine in New York City. I'm jealous. She sat by a lady who works for Remax. (Neither of them obviously work for newspapers.) It's funny how these newspaper people, those two other women, and I all perform the same job, but when we break it out into journalists and non-journalists, things become competitive. Ha! The only thing I have in common with these people is that we all like to edit copy. And we can write headlines. And we sit in breakout sessions for hours at a time discussing grammar (other people would probably rather poke their eyes out, right?) During the last session I went to, we argued about hyphens--the never-ending battle--and wondered which of us is the person with the "common sense" required to understand whether or not a hyphen is needed in sentences like small business owner.

But hey. I used to work for a newspaper in Salt Lake. Not as a journalist, of course, but I got familiar with the business enough that I can understand newspaper lingo. Journalists don't bother me. I can write a headline and a deck and probably an A1 article just as well as the next person. Now, we should start a discussion about how "continued on A9" lines break up the readers' thought process and probably shouldn't exist...

Another discussion. For the record, I hate the ampersand symbol. How do you put it--and a serial comma--together? It just looks ugly. I could have personally asked Bill Walsh from the Washington Post what he thinks about an ampersand series, but I am not sure he would really care since he is a journalist and doesn't use serial commas, and the three top floors of the hotel are listed in the elevator as "16, 17 & 18."

Also, I'm convinced that people who buy Fiji water are possessed by the marketing devil. I asked for bottled water today at lunch, and the waiter brought me Fiji water. I was disappointed that I wasn't whisked away to Fiji--it would have been much warmer than the snowy environment of Denver. (Do you realize I could potentially stay in this hotel for 72 hours without setting foot outside?) There are three restaurants in here--they all cost an arm and a leg--but whatever. The point is, all water tastes the same to me; I'm just glad to have a plastic container to hold it in.

By the way, Thursday nights are back on TV. Three cheers for the Office, Scrubs, ER...yes, I had a lazy evening. It was fabulous. I also had a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar.

I think I'm going to go to bed now.