(CORRECTED) Technically clueless journalism reaches another new low with “Twitter essayist” Jeer Heet, whose non-Twitter article:
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isn’t marked up as an ordered list
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keeps talking about enumerated entries when in fact entries on Twitter are numbered only if you treat Twitter like a Selectric and type actual digits. Twits read backwards, which makes top-posting sound almost responsible by comparison. (“One problem: keeping track of numbers. Sometimes I miss one” is another way of saying “Twitter does not support markup, which this article proves I don’t understand and could not use anyway”)
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fails to acknowledge that, while “Twitter essays” exist in some liminal sense, they don’t exist as an actual hyperlinkable entity, which is as good as not actually existing on the Web
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again acts as though having somebody else “Storify” (v.) your Twits is a valid method of Web publishing
Downtown Toronto journalists: Utterly technically inept and eager to reinforce their ineptitude to each other. They think journalism is Gmail and Twitter (and Storify manqués). Every downtown Toronto journalist is a low-water mark for every other such journalist, whose abilities, like their expectations of themselves, can never be underestimated.
Let’s also take a look at the borked Unicode on Heer’s site:
When alerted by E-mail to almost all the foregoing last week, including the borked Unicode, I didn’t get a response. But, apparently quite separately, Heer went on to write for the Globe a defence of everything he does wrong, using incorrect HTML to do it. (I left the wrong impression about cause and effect in the first published version of this paragraph, and that prompted Jeet Heer to write in. You’re reading the corrected version.)
Also separately and regarding a different article, my favourite Globe developer explained that the lack of ordered lists comes about due to lack of human intervention. That indeed would be the problem.