I was reading in the Boston Metro (condensed newspaper franchise) today a short paragraph-long story about how Merriam-Webster’s most looked-up word is ‘integrity’, and I wondered, how does the newspaper get these kinds of stories? Do they have a reporter scouring the Internet to find the most obscure “news” possible? Or does M-W have a press conference for publicity purposes?: “Hey guys, our most looked-up word is ‘integrity’. Just saying.”
I don’t mean “weird news”, I just mean news that’s such a non-event that it seems strange that anyone would have known about it.
There newswires put out soft news too.
AP, UPI, Reuters.
It’s not all death and dying.
Any large enough operation with a PR department – or contracted PR firm – will periodically put out reports just on what they’ve been doing and how are things. The wire services or publishing syndicates will collect such and put them out for their affiliates to pick up.
I know, but it seems that with most “soft news”, you can understand how they found the story. A human interest reporter, for example, actively seeks out the story on the local deaf conjoined math teacher twins. Does someone from the newspaper call up Merriam-Webster and say, “Got anything for me?”
Ah, thanks. I had a feeling it might be something like that.
In the end, this is mostly about brand building and getting you to visit their websites when you need to look up a word, or better yet, get you to notice their dictionary when you pass by the reference section at the local bookstore. It also shows that the dictionary they produce isn’t “dead”, it is always being updated with new words and definitions.
Newspapers are more than happy to play along with such stories because it fills up space they would otherwise have to pay their own writers to fill.
Merriam-Webster has been doing the Word of the Year for awhile. 2004’s was “blog”. Last week the New Oxford American Dictionary announced their word of the year was “podcast”. I think this is the first time they’ve done their own “Word of the Year”. Perhaps they’re making an effort to increase the awareness of their dictionary…