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Main stream media, making us dumber one word at a time.

SunnyD

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
Was just reading this article on Yahoo regarding Avatar's take at the box office, and I kept running into a word used frequently throughout when discussing receipt totals...

Total foreign take by director James Cameron's 3D blockbuster now stands at $1.844 billion -- thus surpassing the $1.843-billion worldwide boxoffice total rolled up by the director's 1997 former record holder, "Titanic." "Avatar's" worldwide cume is $2.550 billion. To date, its foreign gross is more than two-and-a-half times its domestic cume of $707 million.

The biggest "Avatar" market on the weekend was Japan, where the weekend take was $4 million from 514 locations for a Japan cume of $140 million. Top market overall remains France where the Cameron epic has grossed a total of $169 million thus far.
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(It is used a few more times later in the article as well)

I had to make sure I wasn't going nuts, and check to see if cume was actually a legitimate word. According to all popular reference sites and the Oxford-English dictionary, it most definitely is not a word.

There you go folks. Main stream media at it's finest...
 
I'd wager Yahoo is in about the same class as USA Today when it comes to respectability in the world of journalism & media.
 
1 second bing search confirmed what I already thought.... its an abbreviation

In the practice of measuring the size of US commercial broadcasting and newspaper audiences, cume, short for "cumulative audience," is a measure of the total number of unique listeners over a period.

The technical definition of cume is restricted by Arbitron as requiring a listener to tune in for at least five minutes
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CUME = Cumulative Audience. It's from radio. Yahoo's doing it wrong because cumulative audience refers to both paying and non-paying audience as in radio. Similar to Nielson/Abitrton ratings.
 
Regardless of whether or not it is a word, it is a very inside baseball term for something that is going to be read by such a wide audience. That is one of the reasons why I get my news from various podcasts and blogs where they know their audience and I know what to expect from them.
 
SunnyD said:
Industry jargon in mainstream media, however, is not.
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That's an opinion. Would you come here and make a thread the next time there is an article regarding GM? Or AIG? IBM? Lets get less mainstream, AMD? ATI?

But back to your original statement, where you say it's "making us dumber"... how does putting an abbreviation, assuming someone doesnt know it, in an article, make the reader dumber? If the reader wants to know it, they look it up, and the reader learns something new.

Or shall we dumb down all journalism to the intellect of SunnyD?
 
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