Llewellyn

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June 18, 2009

How Newspapers Got It So Wrong

As newspaper after newspaper hits the wall, there is a great wringing of hands and rending of garments. The self-regard, so long a feature of journalism not shared with the public, has given way to self-recrimination. Journalists are confronting their own long-held assumptions about what it is that their readers want.

Daily newspaper journalism, in particular, is feeling unloved and sensitive to the repudiation of how it has functioned for more than a century with very little innovation. The printed news has, you might say, been stuck in a rut.

Newspapers, while urging others to innovate, have shunned change for themselves. The last great revolution in newspapers took place after World War II, when The New York Herald Tribune introduced what is now known as horizontal make-up. That is, headlines and articles are spread across two or more columns rather than running straight down in single columns, as they do in The New York Times. The New York Herald Tribune (a direct descendant of The New York Herald, once edited by Horace “Go West, Young Man” Greeley) also introduced the use of Bodoni typefaces – a boldface for news and a lightface for features – which, along with the new layout, was adopted by a majority of newspapers across the country and is still favored today.

The theory behind the single column layout was that you could display more articles “above the fold” of the newspaper and this would boost street sales, at a time when most newspapers were sold by vendors with booths on street corners and in train stations.

Even when most newspapers are sold on subscription and are home-delivered, and boxes have replaced vendors, the mythology about jamming many stories onto Page One persists. In Britain, this is regarded as counterproductive because it makes it necessary to “jump” all of these articles – and that in itself is less user-friendly than reading the newspaper section from front to back. When I was an editor at The Washington Post, we were pleased when we had nine “jumps” off Page One. Nobody cared about the impact on the newspaper reader.

Another myth that bedeviled editors was the headlines. At some point, it became the conventional wisdom of newspaper editing that each of the top two lines of a headline could not end in a conjunction or preposition. So- called “read through” headlines were rejected. One of the results of this formulation was that some headlines were unintelligible, as the copy editors struggled with word and meaning contortions to satisfy the rule that held that each line of headline ought to be able to stand on its own. This is nonsense, but it has dominated newspaper editing for more than 100 years.

Another dubious rule is that all headlines must contain a verb. This led to the use of meaningless verbs like “set,” “slated” and “seen.”

The need to add verbs belongs right there with another newspaper taboo – the use of the first person. One night in The Washington Post newsroom, Richard Cohen (who became a very successful syndicated columnist) arrived with a story about a robbery. The editors rewrote his story, ascribing what had happened not to Cohen, who had witnessed the crime, but to the police: “Police said” had been added to every third sentence. The police, Cohen protested, had not arrived on the scene until much later.

A great debate erupted, involving half of the newsroom. I suggested that we let Cohen write the story in the first person because it cried out for that. No, said the city editor. Impossible. In the end, the story had a clumsy construction like “a reporter on the scene said . . .”

These and other arcane practices might have continued for many years if it were not for the Internet, which has exposed the rigid nonsense that has hobbled daily newspapers for more than a century. Apparently people did not want to know that headlines had to be written to fit rules, or that the most paltry headline had to have a verb, or that reporters had to avoid any reference to themselves even when it was essential. We got it awfully wrong for an awfully long time in journalism.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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