Couple thoughts and ideas for Kill The Cliche
KillTheCliche.com fell into my rss reader today (via delicious’ most-popular journalism-tagged links). It’s an idea I wanted to do myself, but, well, in the war of ideas many fall victim to Mr. Not-Enough-Time’s axe.
Anyway, Kill The Cliche measures cliches in articles from The Boston Globe, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Financial Times and Los Angeles Times (read more about what they do here). They break it down by publication, by cliche’d word, and by the number of cliches a reporter has written.
Right now they seem to be tracking the whole number of cliches a reporter, or publication, has produced. This isn’t as useful as measuring the cliches as a percentage of total words produced (as in, “1 percent of Jill Drew’s words are cliches,” or, “0.5 percent of the Washington Post’s words are cliches.”)
Also, measuring a ratio of articles with cliches in them and articles without cliches in them could be another useful metric (”5 percent of the Financial Times’ articles have one or more cliches in them.”)
I’d like to see a list of the cliches they’re tracking, too.
And those are my thoughts on KillTheCliche.com.