Tomayto, Tomahto
Since MATTER launched in November 2012, we’ve been labouring to bring you colourful stories that realise our goal of creating kick-arse long-form journalism. That’s still our goal, but from now on it’ll be labor; colorful; realize; kick-ass. We’re replacing British English, which we used for our first ten stories, with American English.
Why? It’s not because we’ve got plans to change something fundamental* about MATTER, just that so much of what we do is US-based. Around two-thirds of our readers are here, as are most of our social media followers, and the majority of our writers, editors, fact-checkers, and copy-editors. I live here, and my co-founder Bobbie Johnson is planning on moving across the Atlantic soon. The fact that we’re both British, and prefer “centre” to “center”, isn’t really relevant.
So our latest story — a fantastic read about how genealogy became a privacy minefield—is the first to be published using the guidelines laid down by the Chicago Manual of Style. As a Brit, it feels very weird to be embracing the serial comma and moving punctuation inside quotation marks. Bear with us as we make the change, and don’t take offence if we make the occasional mistake.
One final point: Adopting American English doesn’t mean we’re less interested in stories from outside the United States.
If you’re an experienced writer and you’ve got a great story from Asia, Africa, Antarctica or anywhere else on the planet, we want to hear from you. Just drop us a line: hello@readmatter.com.
*Not strictly true. We will soon have news of a fundamental change here at MATTER. And it’s about something much more exciting than our style guide.
