Associated Press Stylebook and Social Media

I woke up this morning, went to my desk and slouched down in a my chair with a hot cup of coffee (black, please). One of my first stops is always the Social Media guide website, Mashable. Blurry-eyed I read the trending headline, "AP Stylebook Adds 42 New Guidelines for Social Media."

Not sure what the AP Stylebook is? Here's the abridged version: The AP Stylebook is typically used by reporters and editors as a guide for grammar, punctuation, usage and some general best practices tidbits tossed in there for good measure.

Okay, so now that that we're all on the same page, what are the 42 new guidelines?

A lot of them are basic acronyms that almost all of us have used at least once in our lives. The list was not without a few surprises though:

• POS - Parent over shoulder. Used by teenagers and children to indicate, in an IM (Instant Message) conversation, that a parent is approaching.
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• LOL - Laugh out loud or Laughing out loud. Use to indicate that the sender has found something funny. See also ROFL.
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• ROFL - Rolling on the floor laughing. One step beyond LOL.

Up until recently I've had another definition for POS and I've always wondered if LOL and ROFL were equals or not. Thanks AP Stylebook for clearing all of that up for me!

A few definitions also slipped their way into the book:

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• Microsite - a tightly focused group of Web pages typically dedicated to a single topic, product or service.
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• Website - a location on the World Wide Web that maintains one or more pages at a specific address.

I think it's great that AP has finally adapted to the rest of the world by accepting website as one word instead of two (Web site). I can't help but wonder why all of the other 'web' words are still two words - Web page, Web feed ... but I digress.

So what does all of this mean for me? What does this mean for you?

Regardless of who you are and what you do, you're going to have some exposure to the print media and you're going to be seeing these new rules and guidelines very soon if not already.

Some of the things laid out in the guidebook are great, but there are a few things that make me raise an eyebrow.

I'm scared to see the day that the front page of the newspaper is written like a Twitter post.

"Thx 4 the retweet. LOL."

*The words in bold are in fact included among the new 42 entries.

I'm sure many will see these changes as progressive and necessary and are championing the decision makers that voted to adopt these entries. And to those people, I say, "Good riddance."

Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe that these acronyms and rules have their place (see also: Urban Dictionary) - I just don't believe that that place is in the AP Stylebook.

This is Journalism that we're talking about. Instead of raising the bar and holding society to a higher standard, the AP Stylebook has lowered the bar by adopting these rules.

G2G.

. m