To directly quote or to not directly quote

I basically posted this same thing on sj.com. People might be out of steam on this subject, but I think this Richard Prince blog entry is an interesting one.

http://www.mije.org/richardprince/some-learned-proper-english-others

We've talked about this numerous times, but there are some other thoughts about the whole thing.

Whenever this comes up, I have to laugh a little about this from AP:

"Never alter quotations even to correct minor grammatical errors or word usage. Casual minor tongue slips may be removed by using ellipses but even that should be done with extreme caution. If there is a question about a quote, either don't use it or ask the speaker to clarify. . . . Do not use substandard spellings such as gonna or wanna in attempts to convey regional dialects or informal pronunciations, except to help a desired touch in a feature."

I positively guarantee you that AP doesn't come close to following its own rule on this. As if every athlete ever quoted in an AP story is quoted verbatim.

My career stops have uniformly cleaned up quotes except for features. But I understand the debate, and the added complication of more and more people being able to hear the direct quote, a discern it's different than the written one, because of multimedia is an interesting one.