Michael Kinsley uses 1,800 words to praise tight writing
Full disclosure: I met Michael Kinsley years ago, and he acted like a complete dick.
I was doing a profile of local boy Pat Buchanan for the now-defunct McLean Providence Journal and spent an evening at Crossfire, where Kinsley and Buchanan were then the partisan co-hosts. Kinsley was extremely condescending and snide — he seemed to find the notion of a local newspaper doing a profile of a resident who had run for president and hosted a cable talk show seen in multiple countries to be “cute.”
That said, I mostly agree with this piece from the January/February issue of the Atlantic, other than its basic premise, which I partially disagree with:
One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.
He then goes on to beat up on several papers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, for writing long stories full of background and reporter opinions delivered via a third party expert. He doesn’t ever cite any evidence that readers don’t like long stories or that anyone has actually ever photographed a reader in the wild tossing down a paper and screaming “TL:DR!”
Like a lot of journalists his age, he also seems to be unaware that every day, readers link countless stories to their friends and colleagues and very few of them are the tiny little news nuggets that consultants keep insisting that readers prefer.
Overall, though, his insights into the journalistic process are spot-on, and might be pretty illuminating to non-journalists, especially when he lets the cat out of the bag about third party experts’ opinions in many news stories. (Which is why I mostly avoid doing it: The only opinions I think a reader cares about are the reader’s own and the involved parties’.)
The total number of words Kinsley needed to illustrate his point, including taking a shot at the NYT for a 1,456-word story? A not-particularly-tight 1,797 words. (I used 374 here, for the record.)
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The main reason he got off Crossfire seems as though was because he was a boring and ineffectual dick. Pat Buchanan may be a bully and wrong-headed about a lot of issues but he deserved a better foil (punching bag?) than Kinsley. The snappiest response he ever came up with was the occasional “Oh, yeah..?” before being overridden verbally by The Buchanan. Oh, Lefties…will you never grow any spine?
Comment by Mozzbi — February 15, 2010 @ 23:33