From an ink-stained wretch (part II)

Elsa's post continued:

"Just a little more before Friday night arrives in earnest....

For instance, back in the day, I was taught that the news pages should be devoted to facts rather than opinion. A news article had a byline, but it was not designed-or allowed--to contain the reporter's opinion. If it did, the piece had to be clearly labeled "Commentary." The traditional "who, what, where, when, why and how" were the building blocks of the story and additional facts were set forth in an inverted pyramid of importance. Your article was incomplete unless it answered all of these questions in a logical fashion, even if meant spending a lot of time, energy and shoe leather doing it. Sources were named whenever possible and two sources were the required norm.

All news stories were edited by someone on the copy desk whose job it was to see that these rules were followed and that the resulting article was clear, concise and grammatically correct. Each individual newspaper of note had its own "Book of Style" and the sine qua non of rules was contained in a little book by Strunk and White called "The Elements of Style." Woe be unto any young reporter who didn't keep a copy of this Bible, copyrighted in 1918, near the closest typewriter.

These things mattered then, and as I'll soon argue, they should matter still. You can ignore them, of course, and still make a pretty good living shouting your opinions-disguised-as-facts online or on the airways. But being a entertainer is not the same thing as being a journalist, and any journalist worth his or her salt never forgets this simple fact. Remaining true to this tradition while changing with the times is at the crux of the dilemma facing news organizations today.

I remember my days on The Philadelphia Inquirer when one of my weekly responsibilities was to receive John S. Knight's Sunday column and to make sure that all of his subsequent corrections were made before publication. The column itself, as well as all of the corrections, came by teletype from Akron, where the great man lived, or from some other dateline where he'd been traveling. It was one of the banes of my existence having to wait until it was clear that no more changes were coming.

Well, one day, as was bound to happen, I let an inconsequential mistake go by. The column was published under the subhead "The Editor's Notebook" rather than the correct "An Editor's Notebook." I simply hadn't caught the error. My immediate boss ran into my office, shouting, "Is John S. Knight THE editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer?" No, I had to admit, that title, in fact, belonged to a man named Creed C. Black (hmmmm). Frankly, I didn't see that it mattered a whole lot. But my boss fixed me with a stare, and through gritted teeth, pronounced that "maybe you know who the editor is, and maybe I know who the editor is, but don't you think that the reader deserves to know, too?"

In some respects, all these years later, I still agree with my younger self, who believed that there were more important things to worry about in life, much less in a daily newspaper. But I also recall my boss' final words on the subject: "Elsa, if the readers can't trust us on this small point, why should they trust us about anything?" And I have to ask, "Why, indeed?"

E.B White got to the nub of the answer, I think, in the last chapter of a revised edition of "The Elements of Style." True reporting, he wrote presciently in 1959, lies in the sublimation of the self:

...to achieve style, begin by affecting none--that is, place yourself in the background........The volume of writing is enormous, these days,and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria........If one is to write, one must believe--in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is
patronizing........Many references have been made in this book to "the reader"--he has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn the writer that his concern for the reader must be pure: he must sympathize with his reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know his wants. The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself. Let him start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living.

It is mind-boggling to realize that this advice was given decades before the birth of CNN and the need to fill airtime 24/7, much less the advent of the internet, Google, Facebook, blogs or Twitter. That the verb "to tweet" would refer to anything other than a birdcall was beyond the imagination of anyone not engaging in science fiction. Yet E.B White had it exactly right.

More to come (MTK, as we used to write at the bottom of unfinished copy)"

Thanks Elsa!