All the, uh, News
By Jeffrey Page
More than 2 million people without power in the northeast over the weekend. Nine people (later raised to 21) dead, including one man who was electrocuted on a downed wire. Phones not working. Trees down all over the place. And some reporters at The New York Times decided to write a cutesy weather story focusing on the colors of autumn and the first snow’s effect on Halloween.
Saturday’s trivialization went like this:
“October, said the calendar. Before Halloween. And the 2.5 million trees occupying New York City’s open spaces confirmed it was fall – not winter – with glorious canopies of leaves stretching along their boughs.
“Yet snow was falling,” the second paragraph went on. “Not a light, mischievous form of precipitation, but heavy wet flakes.”
How could a reporter write such drivel at a time of great human suffering. More important, how could an editor allow it?
The Times story eventually reported that 2.5 million people from Pennsylvania to New England had no electricity. Which sounds like lead material, but the Times made us wait for the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth, we learned that 750,000 people in Connecticut alone had no power. The ninth paragraph – the ninth! – noted that this was a nor’easter with winds as high as 60 mph. Still, the top of the story was devoted to glorious canopies of leaves in the time just before Halloween.
Sunday’s storm story led with concern about Halloween costumes.
“Is it timely? Is it clever? Does it fit?” the Times fluffily began.
Second paragraph: “From New England down to Maryland on Saturday, revelers heading to weekend Halloween parties added a new criterion to choosing a costume: How would it fare in a northeaster?”
Through the next 24 paragraphs – 24! – you came across no mention of costumes, leading one to suspect that the hunt for the right outfit was more a conceit in a writer’s head than anything witnessed in the streets.
This Times treacle made me recall the advice I got as a cub from a great city editor, the late Marty Gately: Don’t be cute; be clever. I also did some checking in the Times’ library.
Some outstanding New York Times leads have been short: “Houston, Monday, July 21 – Men have landed and walked on the moon.” (Think of all the green cheese, man-in-moon and moon-June clichés that might have popped up in this story if it had been written this week and not in 1969.)
And some outstanding Times leads have been long: “Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York’s World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims, while a third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia. There was no official count but President Bush said thousands had perished, and in the immediate aftermath the calamity was already being ranked the worst and most audacious attack in American history.” (The reason you read right past the clichés in that one is because there are none.)
By Monday morning, the Times got the snow story straight, though readers might have wondered why the paper reported that 12 inches of snow had fallen on Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Conn., but failed to include a word on conditions at JFK, Newark, LaGuardia and Stewart.
Still the Times couldn’t get away from its idiotic Halloween fixation.
“It was a storm of record consequence, disrupting large swaths of the Northeast in ways large and small: towns were buried in dense snowfalls, closing down streets, schools and even, in some cases, Halloween celebrations.”
This Times story contained eight consecutive paragraphs about the ruination of Halloween. In fact, four of those paragraphs were about a town official cancelling Halloween and then relenting – in Hollis, N.H.
In the Times newsroom, I guess they call it journalism. What do you call it?
jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Tags: Jeffrey Page
November 3rd, 2011 at 10:48 am
So you’re saying that beginnings are just as important as endings? Sounds lie someone had a preconceived story that was not going to die.
November 3rd, 2011 at 11:07 pm
Well, I admit I didn’t read the NY Times stories on the days of and subsequent to the great snowfall, but a couple of observations might be made nonetheless. Retailers consider Halloween to be gaining rapidly on Christmas as The Holiday of the Year, saleswise. It may well be that in coming years we’ll be seeing Halloween as more important in the eyes of younger readers of newspapers (and online news sources). Actually, it looks to me as though an editor may have attempted – unsuccessfully – to combine a news story with a fluff weather piece. Or, if the editor actually received the story as one piece, he or she should have split it, put the factual account (including the tragedies) out front and sent the cutesy fluff to the back or near the weather forecast.
November 6th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Jeff —
The more news I read these days (whether in print or on-line), the less I’m convinced that ANY editor ever has a hand in shaping it.
As you well know, the old-school rules were: “Get it first. Get it right. Get it out.” Today, they appear to be: “Just Tweet or re-Tweet it; don’t worry if it’s right. If it’s not, correct it in a snarky follow-up.”
The copy editor — a noble pro who could catch and fix everything from outright typographic and grammatical errors to more nuanced problems in sentence structure — has gone the way of the Stegosaurus, at the TIMES and other major news outlets.
Consequently, Channel 4 TV News — and its network counterparts — make laughable mistakes in reflexive phrases, day in and day out. A recent example: “Thrown far from the crushed car, the rescue team couldn’t locate the injured dog for hours.”
The only place on earth that still takes the rules of English grammar, spelling, style and rhetoric seriously is Shanghai. The kids there study nine hours a day, six days a week, and can all speak and write “our” language impeccably. One wonders why . . .
November 6th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Thanks, Tom. And if I recall correctly, there was a concern for the plight of the people and an understanding of what is news and what is fluff.
Any number of city editors used to remind us about the need to take people seriously. Thus, you would not put a gory accident picture on Page 1 since a lot of people would be reading the paper over their morning eggs and toast.
Alas, journalism, with all its warts, was different then. Maybe better, maybe not. In any case, it took readers far more seriously than it does now.
Halloween or electricity? What a question.
Your pal,
Page