The Associated Press announced this week “after more than 80 years, we’re planning to retire the storied term ‘Associated Press Writer’” in recognition of the realities of the online age.

This is silly. I think the AP is doing this to call attention to its digital savvy, and not because the change brings with it more accuracy or clarity. The number of professional writers, online or off, engaged in what we originally think of as “writing” (dragging a pen or pencil across a sheet of paper), is insignificant.

Standard equipment at the Associated Press?

The verb “to write” means, in the case of “a writer,” to compose words into sentences and paragraphs. According to the Oxford Dictionary, write has among its many definitions:

Compose (a text or work ) for written or printed reproduction or publication; put into literary form and set down in writing: I didn’t know you wrote poetry; he wrote under a pseudonym; he had written about the beauty of Andalucia

Computing: enter (data) into a specified storage medium or location in store

Remember typewriters? The word is a portmanteau describing a machine that writes by hammering a set of keys onto a piece of paper. These keys look like the movable printer’s type of their day. The typewriter was invented in the mid 19th Century and was used well into the 1980s, over 100 years later. Its name never changed despite that no writing of the conventional sense was done on it.

Cut-and-paste is another example of how words change meaning and are not necessarily archaic for doing so. Originally, this term came from newspaper layout, where the output from a typesetting machine was literally cut up and pasted, along with photos and graphics, to create a complete page. (I know whereof I speak. We were still doing paste-up when I graduated from journalism school in the 1980s.)

Today, cut-and-paste means to use a mouse, keyboard command or other means to move characters or pixels from one place to another in a computer program. There is no paste and no scissors involved, all the better so that we no longer need to worry about running with scissors.

Finally, I have some suggestions of additional changes the AP might want to consider:

Digitizer: Anyone who enters words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs using any kind of computing device

Pixellator: Similar to a digitizer, a pixellator is anyone who creates and modifies online images

Digital Information Transfer Specialist: Anyone who moves digital information of any kind from one place to another, within a program or document, or between them. Essentially replaces the archaic “cut-and-paste”

I don’t care what the AP says. I am a writer and an author. Writing is a process and a craft, and for some, a lifelong passion, not a mechanical act defined by the medium it is done in.

Note: In my inimitable sense of humor, I originally titled this post “AP Web Correspondents to be Called ‘Webists.’” Unfortunately, I was the only one who got the joke. My apologies to anyone who thought the headline was true.

Tags: AP, associated press, writer, discontinue, byline