Just the other day one of our writers used the phrase "a myriad of."

As in, "They will receive a myriad of knowledge."

Now, I was always taught in journalism school - lo these 2.5 decades ago - that "myriad" was an adjective.

It couldn't be a noun.

So I informed the writer that he had misused the word myriad in his story.

"Myriad is an adjective, I told him. "You can't use it as a noun. The correct usage is 'they will receive myriad knowledge,' not 'a myriad of knowledge.'"

I was confident, haughty, authoritative.

"Are you sure, because I'm used to seeing it 'a myriad of?'" the staffer asked.

"Yes, you see it that way all the time, but that's wrong," I assured him.

Despite my lofty level of certainty I decided to follow the advice of James J. Kilpatrick, a top-rate wordsmith and once one of the most widely syndicated political columnists in the country.

Kilpatrick admonished writers to be careful, to always be sure of facts and grammar.

"If your mother says she loves you, check it out," he said.

So I checked it out.

I consulted Merriam Webster online at www.m-w.com/home.htm If only I could have seen the look on my face as I read the following:

"Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase 'a myriad of,' seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.

Ah, yes, and it had occurred in reputable English right before my eyes in my own staffer's work and I asked him to change it.

What next? Will they make data and media singular nouns?

I suppose over time things change and I get that. I am not averse to change.

But for me, myriad was a significant paradigm shift.

And there are other paradigms that have shifted for me in the world of journalism over the last 25 years.

Some of them have been for the better.

Like the relative significance of local news.

When I first got in this business, editors of small dailies scrambled to get the latest version of the top national and international stories on the front page.

They had to do that because the newspaper was the only source for in-depth coverage of those stories.

The only other place a consumer of news could get the information was on the radio or during the evening news on one of three television networks.

Not much in-depth coverage was going to happen on radio or TV, so the newspaper was the primary source.

Today it's different and I think that's a good thing.

Today, by the time you sit down to read your newspaper, you probably already know about the latest in Washington or Iraq.

Today, the Internet and cable news channel provide more in-depth national and international coverage than a news junkie can consume.

This allows small dailies to concentrate on local news.

I like that. I like it when every story on our front page is a local story.

Sure, some people might accuse us of being 'Mayberry.' But let's be honest. We are a lot closer to being Mayberry than we are to being Chicago.

And the technology is great. I love the technology. The way we handle text and photos is so much more efficient. It's wonderful.

But a bad paradigm shift for me has been the blending of news and opinion.

I had a journalism professor once who taught me a lesson regarding the blending of news and opinion that I will never forget. I have passed this along many times over the years.

I was assigned to cover a traffic accident for the campus newspaper. An 8-year-old boy riding a bicycle was struck and killed by a car.

I came back to write the story and wrote something like, "The community is mourning the tragic death of ..."

The professor pulled me aside and asked me, "Who said it was a tragedy?"

"Uh, I guess I did," was my lame reply.

"You report the facts. Let readers decide if there's a tragedy," he told me.

How far flung are we from that style of reporting these days?

We strive for that Dragnet, "Just the facts ma'am" style of journalism here at the local level. It's a struggle, but we strive.

It's a struggle because there is no such thing as unbiased reporting.

There is fair reporting, but every reporter carries a bias. Every reporter shows up to an interview or a meeting with a preconceived notion of what lies ahead.

Every reporter has an opinion about his or her sources.

But I assure you, we try to keep opinion out of our local news stories.

Not so in the national media.

I routinely see the opinion of the writer in news stories - especially stories about politics.

I watch TV reporters get downright argumentative with their sources. I see all manner of spin and slant.

I suppose that can be explained by the competition for ratings among the news networks, but I see it in print, too.

I guess it's just the way journalism has evolved over the years.

Yes, the news business has undergone a myriad of changes over the years.

I won't resist most of them. [[In-content Ad]]