2008-08-02-ProddingTheAP

As mentioned by John Steele in this thread, a lot of newspapers get their stories from the AP and posted a letter he'd written. He's my recent addition to their inbox:

Measurement conversions are often inaccurate and unnecessary. The integrity of the story is upheld and it is easier to read with only the original measurement or with the original measurement listed first and, if necessary, a conversion listed in parenthesis after.

I read a lot of AP articles and it's fairly common for measurement conversions to be wrong or obvious to the point they disrupt the flow of the article. An example of this is the piece about the Japanese definition of obese being reevaluated. The piece lists 35.4in waistlines for men which reads oddly (what government organization would use fractions of an inch to define something like that?) and unfortunately also has rounding errors in it so that papers in other countries who sourced from the AP article and switched it back to the original centimeters ended up with 89cm instead of 90cm. So now the measurement is in the original measuring system and is unnecessarily wrong.

Assuming that measurement is codified in the AP style guide, could you please amend it to read something like: Measurements shall always be listed with the original system first and, optionally, may have a conversion into another form of measurements in parenthesis after.

Adding to maintaining integrity in your stories, conversion is time consuming so you'd save a lot of time and money by avoiding it.

Take the time to write to them at info@ap.org and let them know how important it is not to do pointless conversions.

While it'd be nice for them to just have everything in metric, that suffers from the same problem as putting everything in US customary (i.e. it introduces unnecessary errors). It's also a lot more likely to succeed if you encourage maintaining journalistic integrity rather than metrication.