Michael Kinsley posted this column for The Atlantic about how newspaper stories are too long, and that is one of many reasons people don’t find the need to read them anymore.(Ironically, the column is fairly long….)
I must say that I agree with a lot of points in this column.
Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins,
“Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.”
Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.” You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one.
As I tell my broadcast writing students, the lead should be short enough to say in one breath…easily. It also should capture attention. This lead really fits neither of those categories.
Kinsley makes a good point that legacy journalism’s focus on explaining the most important information as soon as possible is posing a problem for people who just want to know the gist of the story.
It’s important for journalists to remember that people— just like them— are busy and don’t have time to read every word in a newspaper. If someone can read the first three paragraphs quickly and know the story, that’s a good start…If they want to know more, they can continue reading.
While Kinsley is correct about this point, he goes on to say that journalists’ use of experts in their stories is unnecessary.
Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles. Another New York Times story from the November 8 front page provides a good example here. It’s about how the crackdown on some Wall Street bonuses may have backfired. Executives were forced to take stock instead of cash, but then the stock went up, damn it. This is an “enterprise” story—one the reporter or an editor came up with, not one dictated by events. And the reporter clearly views the information it contains as falling somewhere between ironic and appalling, which seems about right. But it’s not her job to have a view. In fact, it’s her job to not have a view. Even though it’s her story and her judgment, she must find someone else—an expert or an observer—to repeat and endorse her conclusion. These quotes then magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one. And so:
“People have to look at the sizable gains that have been made since stock and options were granted last year, and the fact is this was, in many ways, a windfall,” said Jesse M. Brill, the chairman of CompensationStandards.com, a trade publication. “This had nothing to do with people’s performance. These were granted at market lows.”
Those are 56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author’s point. Yet I, for one, have never heard of Jesse M. Brill before. He may be a fine fellow. But I have no particular reason to trust him, and he has no particular reason to need my trust. The New York Times, on the other hand, does need my trust, or it is out of business. So it has a strong incentive to earn my trust every day (which it does, with rare and historic exceptions). But instead of asking me to trust it and its reporter about the thesis of this piece, The New York Times asks me to trust this person I have never heard of, Jesse M. Brill.
Of course this attempt to pass the hot potato to a total stranger doesn’t work, because before I can trust Jesse M. Brill about the thesis of the piece, I have to trust The New York Times that this Jesse M. Brill person is trustworthy, and the article under examination devotes many words to telling me who he is so that I will trust him. (By contrast, it tells me nothing about the reporter.) Why not cut out the middleman? The reason to trust this story, if you choose to do so, is that it is in The New York Times. What Jesse M. Brill may think adds nothing. Yet he is only one of several experts quoted throughout, basically telling the story all over again.
I completely disagree with this point of view. Jesse Brill is more important than the reporter. When you go into newspaper journalism, you should know that it is a life of low pay and little glory. The reporter is just an informer, observer…In this case, the editor should have done a better job to take out the reporter’s opinion, thus cutting the length in a different way. The New York Times is trustworthy now because it’s reporters have taken the step to find a qualified person to talk about these issues. It would just be a rag if it didn’t do that.
Also, this quote and many other “expert” quotes are often boring and not worth the space and ink they require. Editors have become more relaxed over the years about when to use quotes and when to paraphrase. Maybe Kinsley misses this because he has been an editor for so long, but a lot of this has to do with a lack of real editing.