By Eric Freedman
The cover is faded, and it’s certainly not the most dramatic or eye-catching item on display at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
But it is important.

It’s Lady Bird Johnson’s newspaper stylebook — “Rules Governing Newspaper Style” — from her days as a journalism student at the University of Texas. She graduated with honors in 1934 and ventured into journalism — the media management side of things to be precise — in 1943 when she bought Austin radio station KTBC for $17,500. She later bought KTBC-TV, a CBS affiliate.
Those investments made millionaires of Lady Bird Johnson and her husband, the future president of the United States. When she died in 2012, her Dallas Morning News obituary noted that “she was the first wife of a president to become a millionaire in her own right. “
I’m not sure how much Lady Bird Johnson would have credited her use of the stylebook for her success as a media mogul — if she were alive, that is.
But truth be told, the Associated Press Stylebook is an important tool for learning to do journalism right and with precision. We use it in our School of Journalism classes and it’s the gold standard in newsrooms.
When Keith Shelton was a journalist-in-residence at the University of North Texas, he wrote a column called “Everything I ever needed to know I learned from my ‘Stylebook’” for Editor & Publisher magazine. I often hand out copies to my students and tell them the stylebook is their friend — with an admonition not to abandon their friend. Continue reading →