Everyone should have a stylebook

AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web anymore – Poynter

Really. You can just make up your own, like the Associated Press does, or you can use one that already exists like, for example, the AP Stylebook. You will save yourself a while lot of arguments with former English teachers if you do, believe me. 

If you do use the AP Stylebook, you no longer have to capitalize the words “internet” or “web,” and if you use Poynter’s stylebook you don’t even have to put quote marks around those words in this sentence, it appears. (Also you could probably save yourself a few commas. Newspaper style is all about saving characters.)

I myself got into something of an argument with a former English teacher once about serial commas; I said yes, she said no. I checked five stylebooks on the issue. Two said yes, two said no, and one—the one I used in English 101—said whatever turns you on. One that said no—do not use the serial comma—was the Associated Press'.

I happened to notice the Chicago Tribune, a paper I was reading regularly at the time, did use serial commas. So I asked a friend of mine who was a Tribune editor how that worked. Oh, he said, we have a guy whose full-time job is putting the commas back into AP copy.

I wonder if they still capitalize internet and web at the Trib.