Why newspaper articles aren't news

Do you still read newspapers?

If you don't, it may be because there is too much verbal noise in the writing.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses this in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Things have changed since I was committing daily journalism at The Associated Press, but I recognize in what he says the artificial tone of newspaper writing.

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.”

You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one. 

There are a couple of explanations. One is that everything in a newspaper is old in Internet time: you've already seen it online or on TV, and so the paper thinks it needs to wrap the facts in "meaning." Another reason is that these highly-paid, well-educated national reporters feel that they are above mere fact-typers. They're smart enough to tell us how to think.

I suspect we've trained ourselves to tune this stuff out, as we tune out annoying ads.