Know Thyself

Newspapers are quick to pry and prod on almost any subject--except newspapers. Hoping to remedy the "voicelessness of the press about its own business" and its "almost psychopathic" sensitivity to criticism, the New England Society of Newspaper Editors began last week to publish an outspoken new magazine, the American Editor. Said Carl E. Lindstrom, executive editor of the Hartford Times, who is the society's president and editor of the new quarterly: "This journal is dedicated to self-examination rather than selfcriticism, but we shall not be afraid to study critically any of our habits."

The soul-searching in Editor's first issue would have seemed even more impressive in the pages of the 22 New England papers that have chipped in to start the quarterly ($1.50 a copy) now being mailed to the editors of most U.S. dailies. But it bore out Editor Lindstrom's words. Items:

P: "The widespread but quite needless timidity with which many papers approach news involving religious controversy" was deplored by Sevellon Brown III, editor of the Providence Journal-Bulletin (combined circ. 202,819). Wrote he: "Any newspaper boss who is afraid of alienating readers or advertisers by the straightforward handling of news or the vigorous expression of editorial opinion when religious viewpoints impinge upon public affairs is seeing things under the bed . . . The bulk of newspaper readers are essentially reasonable people over the long run. They'll howl plenty when you tread on their pet opinions -- especially religious opinions. But if they see that you don't hesitate to tangle with other groups as well as with theirs, they won't do any thing more than howl."

P: Journalism's technological progress has bred too much sameness and mediocrity, according to Editor Henry Beetle Hough of Massachusetts' weekly Vineyard Gazette (circ. 4,993). Examples: "If the same standards that apply to local newspaper writing on the score of interest, concision and carrying its own weight generally were to be applied to some of the syndicated columns of random comment and discourse, the columns would be thrown out of the paper ... As for the editorial pages of the daily newspapers, it is easy to imagine that the visitor from Mars would at once assume they could be made up only of certain building blocks labeled Pegler, Sokolsky, Lawrence, Pearson, and so on."

P: Newspaper coverage has not kept pace with the upsurge of public interest in the arts, wrote Theodore H. Parker, longtime critic of all arts for the Hartford Courant (circ. 99,812). "Theater, music, fine arts, dance reviewers are still too often the products of chance. True, not all newspapers need a full-time critic in one or all these fields. But the choice of even a part-time critic, or occasional reviewer, does not always get the care that would be taken in assigning a man to other specialized beats."

Perhaps the most telling critique came from George K. Moriarty, telegraph editor of the Hartford Times (circ. 116,012), who wrote: "The ground plan and execution of the news story today are as out of date as sonnet writing or the sleigh ride." By long usage, wire services and most newspapers cram the major facts into the first paragraph, then return to each point later for fuller treatment. The result is repetition that taxes both "the paper's newsprint supply [at $135 a ton] and the reader's patience"; it also impairs the readability of many stories that would gain suspense and clarity from a straightforward telling in narrative style. The old-fashioned story structure developed so that the makeup man in a hurry could cut any story from the bottom without destroying its sense. But today, Moriarty wrote, the breadth and quantity of news require the modern technique of planning pages carefully so that the editor knows in advance how much space awaits each story.

The task of modernizing the antiquated news writing as it flows in "would throw an intolerable burden on copy editors the country over except that there isn't much copy editing going on. The last copy editor is either dead of overwork or in a coma of frustration ... In a survey of editing and story structure in New England papers a few months ago, the most surprising fact to emerge was that there was no editing--or practically none--and that story sequence, no matter how awkward, was accepted without question."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.