The paradox in defining the City of Angels

The New York Journal of Books looks at the authors of Los Angeles attempt to define America’s new second city: is it a palm-shaded paradise with great weather or a vapid silicone desert of asphalt?

Guest Post: The view from Cape Town

Hey all, did you know we have an office in Cape Town, South Africa? And like yours truly, they’re stoked about World Cup. Here’s a blog from our South Africa marketing guru, Ashley Parsraman.

Guest Post: Welcome to our lovely new interns!

By Rebecca Yeager, Publicity Intern Extraordinaire

The twenty interns for the Cambridge University Press Summer 2010 Internship Program began our first week with an orientation meeting with Benjamin Jeremiah, the Employment Manager. He gave us an overview of Cambridge University Press, such as the structure of the publisher, and an ample amount of information about fire safety. When it came time to filling out forms for contact information, I belatedly realized I should have packed a pen when I was nervously crammed nearly everything else – from tictacs to chapstick – into my bag, and two of my neighbors immediately offered me their pens.

News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer

Fair, balanced, unbiased, impartial. Journalism, in theory and by definition, hinges on an ideal of neutrality, an expectation of the direct presentation of facts and findings. Yet the process of news-making is a constant ebb and flow of editorialization. From the selection to the construction of a story, editors and journalists invariably serve as a filter – controlling everything we read, see, and hear.

Today, Colleen Cotter, a former news reporter and editor and the author of the forthcoming News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism, dissects the inner workings of the media to define the processes and practices that go into crafting our understanding of the day’s events.

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How to be a language savvy news consumer

By Colleen Cotter

All professions have them: routines of interacting and communicating that become normalized. That become part of the everyday routine of doing business. A pilot’s FAA-mandated cockpit routine revolves around safety talk. A Disneyland employee uses the specified vocabulary of the Magic Kingdom to enhance the visitor experience. A police officer’s question-asking style leads to “just the facts, ma’am” while the therapist’s are more personal.

So it goes with news language. News language isn’t about “correctness” as such, although that’s part of the picture. It can also tell you a lot about what goes on behind the scenes in a newsroom, how reporters and editors think about things, and what the news conventions are.

To become a language-savvy news consumer, you have to think both small (words and patterns) and big (culture and concept). Here are some suggestions:

Guest Post: Dinner with a Marketing Associate, an Editor, a Cambridge Author… and his Family

By Stacey Kahn

As the marketing associate for life science and engineering titles, I work on a vast array of subjects. From Quirks of Human Anatomy to Compression for Multimedia to A Designer’s Guide to Asynchronous VLSI, the scholarship covered in these books can be somewhat overwhelming. And, while general correspondence with an author is normal, I rarely get to put a face to a name or discuss anything beyond the initial marketing of a particular book. That’s why attending meetings in my subject areas can be so rewarding. Here, I get to meet many of my authors, learning a lot more about the books themselves and the individuals that write them.

I was recently in San Francisco to attend the annual Biophysical Society Meeting with my editor, Katrina Halliday. It’s a meeting that does not vary from one year to the next. But on the third day of this year’s event, Patrick Dillon – an author who had just signed his contract with Cambridge – came by the booth and offered to take Katrina and myself out to dinner that night. I was worried that it would be uncomfortable and did not want to go but, not to appear rude to a future Cambridge author, I reluctantly accepted the invitation.

Patrick, wife and daughter in tow, picked Katrina and I up after the booths closed for the day and the five of us headed down to the Fisherman’s Wharf. Although a little awkward at first, once we ordered our dinners, the conversation began to flow more naturally. I learned about Patrick’s current research and the details of the book he is writing. But I also learned about why Patrick is conducting the research he is doing, why he is a professor at Michigan State, and why he has decided to write a book now.

As someone who rarely gets to experience this kind of interaction with an author, it was refreshing to be able to converse with Patrick this way. The opportunity to receive such a vast amount of insight from Patrick made me feel more connected to the future book and to one of my subject areas. It really made me appreciate the work that they do as well as the work that I do in support of them, and I would jump at the chance to go out to dinner with any of my authors in the future.

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Patrick Dillon is a professor in the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University in the Physiology Department. His research focuses on the physical properties of molecules that bind as complimentary pairs. Patrick also studies the physiological consequences of the binding of the pairs. His intention is to write a biophysics book, based on physiological examples (including at the cell and molecular level), rather than a physiology book with a biophysics slant. Patrick’s book is tentatively called: Biophysics: A Physiological Approach.