Friday, November 01, 2013

What they think their audience knows

 This sentence is from this article:
Mr. Kerry’s trip, announced by the State Department on Thursday, will begin Sunday and include scheduled stops in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Warsaw; Jerusalem; Bethlehem, West Bank; Amman, Jordan; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Algiers; and Rabat, Morocco. 
So the NYT editors think that their readers know where Warsaw, Jerusalem, and Algiers are (or at least what countries they are in), but not the countries contain the cities of Riyadh, Bethlehem, Amman, Abu Dhabi, or Rabat.

That seems like a really strange place to draw the line to me. I mean, why would Algiers be more familiar than Rabat? But I guess they think they know their audience.