American
If you think your local paper is a bit rough, you should see what American newspapers get away with. All the journos write as if they are aiming to win a Pulitzer Prize – and sod the readers.
It drives you crazy, reading a simple story about a car crash or someone rescuing a cat from drowning. Everything has a delayed-drop intro. It makes you scream: “But what’s the bloody story?”
I’ve done a fair bit of training there. When you talk to them about putting the main point of the story in the first sentence, you feel a bit like Moses coming down from the mountain. “Keith, that is a great idea!”
I think the problem is probably because most of their teaching comes from universities. So why should that be a problem?
Last year, I was at a conference and met someone from a US university that had better remain unnamed. He boasted that they had more than 100 people in their journalism faculty. “How many have been journalists?” I asked casually.
He thought, and answered: “Two.”
I was in New Jersey to attend a Dion concert. (DiMucci, not Celine. Come on!) He’s getting on, and seems unlikely to come to the UK again, so I headed for the Count Basie Theatre on Red Bank.
It wasn’t all perfect: the lights looked they were done by the usherette with a torch; the sax player looked like Zoot from The Muppet Show and Dion only played for 90 minutes. But I guess 90 minutes of rock n’ roll takes it out of you when you’re nearly 70. His voice is still amazing, however, considering that he was touring as a teenager with Buddy Holly.
I thought the theatre press office could get some mileage out of it (Man travels 3500 miles for Dion gig) and emailed the local paper too. I’d rather hoped to voice my trenchant views on the state of US journalism as well – but neither bothered to get in touch.
The paper’s front-page was about the problems of graduates getting jobs and some junior baseball team getting knocked out of a cup competition in the quarter-finals. Nice to see such a sharp news sense at work. God bless America.