Editor’s note: We have changed this styleguide to favor capitalization of proper nouns even when the entity prefers to be rendered in lowercase. Likewise, Poynter prefers to cast the names of news organizations in lowercase, with the exception of the outlet’s first letter and inter caps (e.g. BuzzFeed, ThinkProgress).
One of the first things reporters at Poynter learn is to bookmark Matt Thompson’s newspaper style guide. While you might not notice if the “The” is capitalized in a news organization’s name, people who work there do (and they’ll let us know). More importantly, it’s our house style to refer to news organizations by the names they prefer, capitalized letters and all. So here’s part two of that first style guide, with updates on the names of digital news organizations. Some of these are straightforward. Some are all caps. Some have no spaces.
For instance, it’s BuzzFeed, not Buzzfeed or Buzz Feed. Although staffers there are used to people lowercasing that f, it is annoying, a BuzzFeed spokesperson told Poynter. And in the past, when they’ve reached out to other news organizations to point out the mistake, they’ve heard, sorry, our style guide doesn’t allow for “vanity capitalization.”
With this update, we’re including organizations that started online. Of course we forgot some, so please let us know in the comments, on Twitter or via email, and we’ll update.
- AJ+
- The Awl
- Billy Penn
- Bleacher Report
- Business Insider
- BuzzFeed
- Center for Investigative Reporting
- Charlotte Agenda
- The Daily Beast
- Digiday
- DNAinfo
- Feministing
- FiveThirtyEight
- Fusion
- Gawker
- Grist
- The Huffington Post
- Independent Journal Review
- The Intercept
- International Business Times
- The Marshall Project
- Mashable
- Mic
- The New Tropic
- Politico
- ProPublica
- Quartz
- Recode
- Refinery29
- Reveal
- Revelist
- The Ringer
- The Root
- Salon
- Slate
- TechCrunch
- Techmeme
- The Texas Tribune
- ThinkProgress
- Thought Catalog
- The Undefeated
- Upworthy
- The Verge
- Vice
- Vox
- Yahoo
Correction: An earlier version of this story noted that some people like to lowercase BuzzFeed’s second f. Clearly there’s only one f in BuzzFeed. We apologize for the error.
