News, print in particular. (OT)

AZ Railfan Wrote:
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> So true! The journalism profession isn't what it
> used to be. I'd be embarrassed to have written the
> above article. Poor word usage and awkward
> phrasing all over place....


I've been watching the decline my entire life (my dob 6/5/61.) IMO, it is worse at city newspapers than the small town ones. Big papers used to have things like research departments and copy editors. Now, not so much, they were the first things to go to save $$$. Small town papers never could afford such luxuries (often were 1 or 2 man operations!) so have declined less, in relative terms, than their larger cousins.

Go to a library (another institution which has declined in my lifetime, btw) and pull up a microfilm copy of any large newspaper from the 1940's, read it through and then read a recent edition of the same paper. The difference is eye opening. It is also appalling.

There is a Bogart movie ("Deadline USA", 1952) which gives a good introduction to how things used to be. Even when it was made it was something of an epitaph, not a picture of what was then current. It came out on DVD several years ago. I showed it to my daughter(dob 6/17/87) and she was angered that current newspapers aren't like that. It's a pretty good flick too, btw.

TV (in the USA, with the exception of some PBS shows) news is shallow and most stuff on the Interwebs is fiction, pure and simple. It takes *work* to be informed these days. You have to supply the background and do the research yourself. And you have to filter out the noise (NOTE: from all extremes) and the fantasy being presented as truth.

The biggest thing I'd change about my local rag (Spokesman Review, Spokane, Washington) would be to have all the reporters taught to give the facts in the 1st paragraph with the rest of the article giving details & *background/story*. In other words, write the way I was taught newspapers were supposed to write when I was in Junior High School. I'm afraid that's too old-fashioned for words these days. The Socialist Review(longtime and ridiculously inaccurate nickname) is still a better source than 95% of teevee and 99% of the 'net though.

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hank