There’s a great discussion of the swearing-in-newsrooms story over on the letters page of Romenesko. My favorite is from an editor noting the landscape beyond common newsroom vulgarity:
In my city editing days at the Boston Herald, fuck was pretty much heard so often that no one ever noticed it. It just meant a standard snafu. But there were degrees of emergency that far exceeded fuck.
I will never forget one exchange between two of the other city editors at the city desk: One of them, Andy Gully, hung up the phone and muttered, “Ruh Roh” — the old Scooby Doo saying.
The other one, Kevin Convey, got a panicked look in his eyes and said, “WHAT! What is it!?!” Gully said in a calming tone, “Nothing much really.” Convey, clearly rattled, looked him square in the eye and said, “Don’t EVER say Ruh Roh unless you mean it!”
I thought at the time and still think that both those two funny fucking fuckers were really fucking fucked.
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Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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