The week before last, a front-page Washington Post story detailed the pressure currently being applied by the online left to Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a moderate Democrat from Northern California. In all it was well-researched and informative — though you can’t tell from reading the Ellen Tauscher Weekly that it’s written by erstwhile BlogPAC operative Bob Brigham, this story tells you — but it also made two errors I found a little puzzling. See if you can tell from the opening graf:
The Democratic majority was only three weeks old, but by Jan. 26, the grass-roots and Net-roots activists of the party’s left wing had already settled on their new enemy: Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.), the outspoken chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.
Or the tenth:
Democratic leaders want their activists to focus on beating Republicans. But the grass roots and Net roots believe the political tide is shifting their way, and they can provide the money, ground troops and buzz to challenge Democratic incumbents they don’t like. MoveOn.org had two Bay Area chapters before the election; now it has 15, and they could all go to work against Tauscher in a primary. “Absolutely, we could take her out,” said Markos Moulitsas Zúniga — better known as Kos — the Bay Area blogger behind the influential Daily Kos site.
See it? Since when is the “netroots” the “Net-roots” or the “Net roots”? And need it even be “Netroots”? Not to mention “grass-roots” and “grass roots.” Odd. Newspapers are given to preferring capitalization of recent coinages and separating new compound words, but even that was rendered here inconsistently. I decided to contact Michael Grunwald, who co-wrote the story and last July was the agreeable subject of a slightly critical post here, also pertaining to the use of language. Just as he did then, Grunwald got back to me quickly:
I wrote the story and I wrote “netroots.” I was surprised to see that someone changed it to “Net roots”; I think it makes us look like we’ve just discovered them there Internets.
Quite. Grunwald said he would find out what the Post stylebook called for and, in contrast to the week and a half it took me to get this post on the web, he had the answer in twenty minutes:
So: I spoke to the head of our copy desk: Net roots is one of the latest additions to our stylebook. He says “we’re conservative on the onewordlowercase-ization thing.” For example, Post style is Web site, not website. He also points out that Post style is grass roots, not grassroots — which is what I wrote — so at least we’re consistent.
Consistently preposterous, in my opinion — Web site? — but there you have it.
Incidentally, for all our conservatism on the onewordlowercase-ization thing, Post style is stylebook, not style book.
There you have it. “Net roots” is the Post’s peculiar preference, and the rest are typos. Yet this is not applied evenly across the website: at The Fix, Chris Cillizza gets away with plain old “netroots,” and in the news pages, Charles Babington got away with the same, so long as he threw “scare quotes” around it (even in quotation).
The online and dead tree bureaus of the WaPoCo are separate entities and so maintain separate policies, and this is surely one of them. I won’t go so far as to say this is a reason why newspapers are losing out to the web, but by refusing to acknowledge political phrases as they are actually used, the Post’s editors are undercutting the credibility of their own reporters. Consistency is good, but being consistently correct is better.
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