The 2011 print edition of the AP Stylebook is available today, and while the focus is on a brand new “Food Guidelines” section, the “journalist’s bible” has updated their social media guidelines section as well to include some new tech terms.
Last year, the AP Stylebook added a bunch of new social media guidelines to their rules for journalists. Among those guidelines was a change from “web site” to “website,” hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend, and follow to be used as verbs.
They also added social media terms “trending,” “retweet” and “unfriend” to the Stylebook. The latter settling the debate once and for all that “unfriend” is more acceptable than “defriend.”
In March, the AP added some notable tech terms to their online edition of the Stylebook. They decided to officially go with “email” as opposed to “e-mail” and they took the spaces out of “cellphone” and “smartphone,” making them one word entities on their own.
In the newly revised 2011 print edition, the AP has added some more social media / tech terms to the Stylebook. Among them – geolocation, geotagging, link shortener, stream and unfollow. I’ve been guilty of hyphenating geo-location in the past, so I’m now glad to have one less character to deal with. They announced these changes via Twitter last night:
@APStylebook
AP StylebookNew Social Media entries: end user, geolocation, geotagging, link shortener, stream and unfollow. #APStyleChat
20 hours ago via CoTweet · powered by @socialditto
As I said before, tech word additions aren’t the focus of the fully revised Stylebook. The focus is food. FYI, the AP added words such as locavore as the preferred term for a person who strives to eat locally and “blind bake” to describe the action of baking a pie crust before filling it. They also added “huitlacoche,” a fungus also known as “corn smut” that grows on corn and is considered a delicacy in Mexico. Mmmmm…corn smut.
But the addition of these new terms continues the integration of our fourth estate with the wonderful word of social media.