Place Names
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Transliterations of place names from non-Roman alphabets
or romanizations from syllabic writing systems can often
be tricky, especially when you have a breaking news
story. For any place not listed in this Style Guide, dpa
generally uses the name as indexed in The Times Atlas
of the World Comprehensive Edition. The many forms of
name that one place may have are exhaustively listed in
the online
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. To use
it, you do need to have a fairly good idea in advance of
how the name might be spelled. Another approach is to
send a query using just a fragment of the name to an
enormous U.S. military database, the
GEOnet Names Server (GNS), which is maintained by
the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Search times are often slow.
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Time & Measures
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Times mentioned in stories should generally have the
equivalent Universal Time (GMT) in
parentheses after them. A useful online tool is the Time
Zone Converter which allows you to write in any
local time and see its GMT equivalent. Daylight saving is
automatically taken into account. See this Style Guide's
Punctuation page for rules on
time notation. The only measurements used in the dpa cast are
those adopted internationally. Advice on how to convert
American and other non-standard measurements can be found
on a U.S.
Standards Institute site, but naturally you should
take care to adopt British spelling: litre not
"liter", metre not "meter" and so on. A handy
conversion tool for U.S., imperial and all sorts of
unusual measurements is provided by the FLW Data
Converter which creates a temporary JavaScript
calculator in your browser screen.
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Usage
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Apart from dpa's own Style Guide there are several
news-copy style books accessible via the Internet. They
have no authority with the dpa desks, but you may find
them useful if you are trying to find cogent arguments
when making a style choice on something that is not yet
covered in this Style Guide. A traditional style guide,
with the entries listed in alphabetical order, is
available online from The
Guardian. The London-based news magazine
The Economist has placed its style guide on the
web. A U.S. journalism-school handbook, The News Watch Project
Style Guide, lists expressions to avoid because they
may be offensive to minority groups.
Both pages of links were compiled by Jean-Baptiste
Piggin. Further suggestions welcome.
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