Hank Stuever’s last in-house Washington Post critique
America’s only pink paper (no, seriously), the New York Observer had this bit on Washington Post Style section reporter Hank Stuever going a wee bit further during his turn in the daily-critique-by-a-staffer thing than the big brass may have intended:
This forum seems to have a lot of focus-group fallout, calling for: shorter stories, faster formats, oh my it’s all too much to handle, I can’t possibly read it all, I don’t know where to start, I get everything I need from my (pet electronic doodad). And, my favorite, from a critique a couple of days ago, the assistant news editor guy who reads the NYT, WSJ (so navigable! Huh?), then gets online and reads everything else, and then and only then might deign to read The Post, which is, again, too this and too that and is an incredible intrusion on his time. Remarkably, the paychecks navigate their way to his bank account every other Friday, which is another way for me to say that I firmly, firmly believe that if you can be bothered to work here, you can bother to read this paper – the meatspace version, not the Web, the printed result that we all worked so hard to make — every day before you read someone else’s. This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding whether or not there’s something worth stopping on.
I think we’ve overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn’t include my life or neighborhood in theirs.
Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: “News Flash: Everything’s Not Always About You.”
OK, that’s probably all funnier to me than it is to some of you, but I’m laughing here. And, frankly, Stuever nails a lot of the stuff that’s wrong with the reader survey results and (to an even greater extent) what the newspaper consultants have been pushing recently.
(Source.)
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
It’s peach, not pink!
At least, that’s what they say.
Comment by Morts — August 23, 2005 @ 5:22
This is why you should never trust the mainstream media.
Comment by Beau — August 23, 2005 @ 18:17