After 2.5 years of editing and writing in British English, I am picking up several bad habits. I occasionally want to stick a gratuitous “u” in a bunch of words — colour, labour, honour. I am beginning to use “ae” instead of “a” — aenemic, encyclopaedia. (OK, not really; I’ll never get used to that […]

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I love the President’s Cup final. It’s a major domestic soccer game, the local version of England’s FA Cup final. But what I really find fascinating is how big this is with the Emirati populace. This attracts regular guys in big numbers, but it also attracts many of the most prominent sheikhs in the country […]

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I am editing sports copy tonight. I have been at The National in Abu Dhabi long enough to recognize that our newspaper is most interested in the British sports suite — which includes cricket, rugby, snooker and (I kid you not) darts. But I have been through several particularly “inside snooker” sorts of stories tonight, […]

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An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States: Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages. Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total […]

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When you’re on the high side of the big five-oh, you get a little more stingy with the “I’ll never forget that!” declarations. At this age, you have a pretty good notion you’ve long since forgotten an awful lot of “unforgettable” stuff. But this setting, this game, this result … was so exotic, so unexpected […]

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To work in a British-English newsroom, like The National, is to regularly hear expressions unknown in the United States. One of the handier is “minus-one,” used when referring to media activities on the eve of a match. That is, it’s about the match, but “minus-one” day on the calendar. It is when coaches come out […]

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The National’s department has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) with top-10 awards for daily, Sunday and special sections from 2011. This used to be known as a “triple crown” but apparently a website category has been created, and papers now seek a “grand slam.” (Maybe we will enter the website category, […]

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I was looking at the website of the Gulf Times, the main English-language newspaper in Qatar, the UAE’s neighbor to the north and west. And while searching out some information on the women’s tennis tournament going on there, I happened upon a “lede” I just have to share. Not because it’s good. But because it […]

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I have several recurring dreams. In one of them, I am on the ground, and for some reason I look up in the sky to see a plane in trouble. In my dream, I seem to be the first person on the ground to have noticed this, and I watch the plane come down from […]

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Actually, I will take credit for this. The entire staff came in one day last month for a meeting with the executive editor, and I remembered some instances in the past where the sudden arrival in the same spot of a group with a common goal but far-flung addresses … seemed like a good opportunity […]

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