The Mario Blog

11.19.2014—4am    Post #2079
Good news Wednesday! Three reasons to raise your glass of bubblies today

It’s a new 8-page (yes, print) business supplement for the Boston Globe. TIME makes opens its archives online for replicas of every issue dating to its founding ion 1923. Who’d know? The Internet is improving our English.

The Boston Globe means Business

The Boston Globe is adding a stand-alone eight-page Business section in December and hiring additional staff.

In a memo to the staff, editor Brian McGrory announced that “we’re reconfiguring the paper to give Business its own section front on Tuesdays through Fridays, starting the first week of December. In fact, Business will get a free-standing eight-page section, somewhere between Metro and Sports. “

Great news, indeed, especially about the hiring of additional staff. WE will be looking forward to reading the new Biz supplement.

TIME’s vault of goodies

Time is launching the fabulously named “The Vault,” an online archive offering subscribers digital replicas of every magazine issue since its founding in 1923.

​Not only are back issues of significant newspapers and magazines useful to researchers. In addition, they provide a great frame of reference for designers to gain a perspective on everything from storytelling to photography and editorial design.  I know that one of my first stops when I first begin to work on any project is to visit the “morgue”, to get acquainted with the past of a publication that is about to undergo a rethink or a redesign.  There are always valuable lessons there. Visually, I pick up details that I sometimes resurrect in my current work. A visual salute to the past is sometimes a nice gesture.

Now we can turn to The Vault and look at TIME's repository of history. Design students can appreciate how much magazine design has evolved since 1923.

The Internet makes our English better

I had to stop and re read this : the internet is actually making English better!

Really? Could that be true that the Internet is improving our relationship with the language?

Apparently so, if you believe the experts  quoted in English 3.0, a new documentary by the London-based filmmaker Joe Gilbert, a film that poses the question to linguists and authors, and they are unanimous in saying that, if anything, the internet is making English more expressive than ever.

I do agree with a statement made by author  Tom Chatfield  that, in a way, electronic communication has actually enhanced the written word. It is a fact that my grandchildren in elementary and middle school are constantly texting their friends. While I have no idea of how their sentence structure and/or spelling is in those exchanges, at least they are involved in writing, using language. Chatfield says in the film that the internet has made possible “mass participation in written culture.” Amen.

As a bilingual person, I found an aspect of this piece fascinating: the world-wideness of the web also means that a more diverse global culture is influencing English and other languages too. The Real Academia Española recently added the internet words “hacker” and “wifi” to the canonical Spanish dictionary.

But the one anglicized word that I love in Spanish, especially when I see it used in El Pais of Madrid, is “tuit” for Tweet. And there is the verb “tuitear” for tweeting something.

Some of those purists of the Spanish language who were my professors of Old Spanish during graduate school will probably not be around to “tuit”, and that is a good thing.

So is the fact that the Internet improves our command of the English language.

Design we like

The Science Museum in the UK is launching a Christmas pop-up store in Kent which uses test-tubes filled with colored water as its key design point.

http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/a-pop-up-store-for-the-science-museum-made-from-4000-test-tubes/3039404.article

Still time to register for Mario Garcia’s Master Class at Poynter

Innovation and Storytelling: Master Class with Mario Garcia

You can attend the class in person, or via the archived replay which will take place right after the live session.

Go here for more details:

https://www.newsu.org/masterclass-garcia

TheMarioBlog post # 1622

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