Ink-Stained Wretches
My pal Yo is one of those ink-stained fingers type, a print journalist who could have made the jump to broadcast news but never did. "It’s too confining," he would complain. "You have to say everything in a minute and a half, and with sound bites, that leaves you about a hundred words. I can’t write that short," he protested.
Indeed writing for television or radio is a whole different animal. Whole news stories are delivered in only a matter of seconds, maybe a couple dozen words, few of which are longer than three syllables. Sentences are short. Everything is linear. Listeners don’t have the option of replaying stories if they don’t understand the first time. And in television, scripts are subordinated to pictures.
"Newspapering used to be an art," Yo observed recently. "Yes, you covered the news, but you also got a chance to write thoughtfully, to create images in peoples minds, images that readers would carry with them to the next issue. Today, in our drive-thru culture," he says, "most local newspapers are just fast food, and not very nutritious."
Can’t argue about that. Unless you read the LA or NY Times, or Washington Post, or a half-dozen other serious newspapers, you are condemned to the news-lite world of recycled drivel from the wires and inept reporting by ill-educated hacks who couldn’t make it in low-end retail. Would that it were otherwise, but essentially local newspapering is fetid morass of police and fire stories, supplemented by "business" stories that -- surprise, surprise! -- feature local advertisers.
Yo was in town for a few days and looked through the local rag, muttering all the way. Occasionally he would laugh out loud, though with less humor than despair. "The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation effort is part of the bi-annual cleanup — done in the fall and spring — of debris around Keswick Reservoir," he read. "Don’t they have editors at your paper?" he asked.
He also was less than impressed by a local columnist, whom he described as a lightweight. "She doesn’t offer enough meat to offend a vegetarian," he claimed, and then read the lead line from one of her columns: "Churn Creek Bottom needs a second truck stop like Shasta County needs hotter summers and more sex offenders." I explained that she was one of the paper’s best writers. He harrumphed, "No doubt."
Yo believes that newspapers are dinosaurs, and the weather is getting colder faster. "Their main problem is the competition. First radio and then television were able to provide the immediacy that newspapers could never match, even when they were printing two or three editions a day. Now with the Internet, you can read what you want, when you want, from a dozen different sources." He added, "The only advantage to a newspaper is that you can fold it up several times and read it in the subway. But of course, it has to be a good paper. And you’ve gotta have a subway."
"Call me a snob," invites my friend and colleague, "but newspapers that fail to inform — fully and accurately — aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, and when people are ill-informed, we wind up with choices like Gore and Bush."
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.