I've joked with friends that one of the underlying, sub rosa themes of this past election is perhaps best exemplified by the tagline from one of Fox's quality reality TV programs, the gist of which apparently involves taking Ivy league MBAs and shooting water balloons at them ("We're sticking it to the smarties!") Happily, my brethren in the news media are finally getting with the program:
In an effort to win new readers, Downie said Post reporters will be required to write shorter stories. The paper's design and copy editors will be given more authority to make room for more photographs and graphics.
I'm going to resist the facile comparison to USA Today. Lest we forget, the much-maligned McPaper has actually started running longer stories. They've also shown a willingness to take risks, something the WP appears to have gotten a bit leery of, most notably during the run-up to Gulf War Deux (by burying stories with cautiously worded headlines like "Excuse Us For Saying This, But Administration WMD Intelligence Might Be A Teensy Bit Off. Or We Could Be Wrong" on page A95). And there are good ways and bad ways of trying to make a publication more engaging. At one point in the early 90s, the picture-to-word pendulum at Time Magazine swung so far away from literacy as to run a cover story headlined "EVIL: Does it exist?" that weighed in at about 1,800 words. Which works out to about a half-word for each year people have been pondering this question.
And the Post, of course, is one of the best newspapers in the country, so I'm sure they'll find an intelligent way of doing this. But the next time they decide to run a story about an all-you-can-eat steak joint on page A1, they'll have to find a way to do it in less than 3,000 words.