Why is the sky blue?
Questions. Questions. We get them all the time.
OK, so no one has asked about the sky’s color; I just wanted to get your attention. But readers pose plenty of other questions — from the mundane to the significant.
Most are about the newspaper. But we also hear from youngsters stumped by homework questions or beery buddies with money riding on the answer to sports questions. Then there was the elderly woman who called during the Y2K scare to ask if she should withdraw her money from the bank before the dawn of the millennium.
Here are some of the questions we’ve gotten lately about The Virginian-Pilot.
AL-QAIDA? Bill Collins of Virginia Beach wants to know why The Virginian-Pilot identifies Osama bin Laden’s network as al-Qaida “and everyone else spells it al-Qaeda?”
Obviously, Collins has been reading other publications, although obviously without an eagle’s eye. The New York Times, for instance, uses Al Qaeda, while The Washington Post opts for al Qaeda. We use neither. Neither do nearby papers like the Daily Press and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Because the bible told us so — meaning the Associated Press, whose Stylebook is known as “the bible” of the journalism industry.
An AP memo distributed in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks said al-Qaida means “the base” in Arabic. It noted the variation in the word’s capitalization, use of a hyphen and a space, but the memo didn’t mention the spelling differences.
If you check the Internet, you’ll find Al Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaida. . . .
In the face of such variation, the AP steps in as arbiter.
Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post is a slave to AP style. “Absolutely not,” says Tony Reid, The Post’s foreign section copy chief.
The Times and The Post usually reply on the advice of knowledgeable personnel in the affected regions. In The Post’s case, the decision to use al Qaeda was made pre-Sept. 11, Reid said.
FIRST NAME/LAST NAME: Adam Kasabian of Chesapeake e-mailed me about something he’s curious about “and something that rather rubs me the wrong way.” It has to do with names — namely, why our feature reporters use first names on second reference when writing about teen-agers while our sports writers (“or for that matter in crime reports or other `hard news’ ”) use young people’s last names.
Personally, Kasabian thinks it’s “subtly patronizing to refer to teen-agers by their first names in the newspaper. To me . . . it is equating them to little kids who you pat on the head and say, `Oh, Little Billy did a good job.’ ”
Be assured, Adam (may I call you that?), we don’t aim to patronize or belittle anyone.
Here’s an explanation of what we do, supplied by Pilot managing editor Dennis Hartig:
“Our stylebook recommends using first names for people under 18. But, as the reader indicated, different editors handle this differently depending on the story.
“It would be odd, for example, to refer to Johnny Smith, 15, as Johnny in the second reference if he has been arrested for a violent act. But it would be just as strange to refer to a 10-year-old by his last name in the less formal setting of a school or neighborhood feature. It also is a practical way of avoiding confusion between parents and children with the same last name.
“Sports reporters observe a tradition of using last names to describe student athletes. To do otherwise would suggest a familiarity that does not exist.”
SAME OLD PHOTOS: Leslie Friedman of Norfolk is the latest reader to ask when we’ll add new photos of area scenes to our daily 24-Hour Weather Snapshot on Page A2.
The answer is “soon.” Why the quotation marks? Because deputy managing editor Denis Finley says it’ll take about six months to spice up the rotation, and that may not fit your definition of soon.
I can hear some of you now: “Six months! All you have to do is send a couple of photographers out to snap a dozen or so new scenes and slap them into the paper. That’s a week, tops.”
We wish it were that simple. We take the photos, but the job of fashioning them to scale and so forth is left to an out-of-state firm.
But a change is definitely coming.
DONNER? Quick, identify Santa’s reindeer. Call them by name, as St. Nick did in Clement C. Moore’s iconic “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
“Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! . . .”
Did you include Donner? I always have. And so did the folks who produced our Christmas Eve feature, “The many faces of Santa Claus,” on the cover of The Daily Break.
But a savvy reader e-mailed me to say that’s incorrect.
It’s not Donner, it’s Donder, the reader said.
And it is. Which came as a surprise to several individuals I’ve asked to name the famed reindeer. Like me, they were sure it was Donner. Or maybe Donna, “a girl reindeer,” as one friend put it.
There’s no need to belabor the point. I just thought you’d like to know. Next Christmas will be here before you know it.
