The paper discusses style planning and the
the development of linguostylistic rules for Estonian newspapers
of 1998–2005. The study is based on four questionnaires
to editors. In 1998 a formal questionnaire was applied to nineteen
daily and weekly papers, while in 2003 five national dailies
and weeklies and one regional paper were studied, and in 2005
twelve dailies and weeklies were involved, supplemented later
by two more national and one local paper. The reason why the
study of 2003 was focused mainly on national papers lay in the
results of 1998, which revealed that the local Estonian papers
did not intend to establish their own linguostylistic rules,
preferring rather to go by those of national papers. In 2005,
however, interest in local press was resumed, trying to find
out what (if any) examples have been followed and to what extent
(if at all) linguistic editing is rendered important in local
papers.
As a result, it was revealed that in Estonian newspapers the
principles of editing are still in a development phase, even
though the recent years have brought significant qualitative
changes. As for style regulation, different practices are followed,
but in general it receives much more attention than in 1998.
However, most of the papers still do not follow any written regulations,
let alone a style book. In comparison with the Soviet period
the linguistic editing of Estonian newspapers has faced a setback.
One could do with more awareness of the positive effect that
a usage standard and good linguistic editing might have, even
from the commercial point of view.
