Why are American newspapers/ magazines so Dull?
More thoughts on the scramble for respectability.
If you have decided that you are a person of significance, doing a job of great importance, you will want others to see you like that as well. In fact, as the editor of a widely-read newspaper, it is vital for your self esteem that all the people you see at parties and opening nights consider you an upstanding member of society.
Unfortunately, being a journalist doesn't really lend itself to respectability, by and large. You work irregular hours. You have poor, or no, job security. You will be sniffed at by bank managers if you want to buy a house. Many of your colleagues will have addition difficulties. And, most importantly, it is your job to tell everyone things that the leading lights of society (the very people who you might eventually meet at parties and opening nights) would prefer if you didn't mention.
Instinctively, we all know that. Journalism is a trade, not a profession- even if for some it can become a very highly paid trade. From the very start, the journalists performing their most socially useful function of questioning what the powerful were saying and doing were those most denounced. "Journalist" became a word that could hardly travel without its natural companion "Scurrilous".
As these low life journalists revealed more corruption, in business and in government, people started to rely on their favourite media (be it newspapers, or later radio and television) to tell them the things they needed to know, but no-one else was going to admit to.
After Watergate, there was hardly any question about the matter- journalists were the most trusted members of society.
But that was part of the difficulty, in the end. It is all very well to be trusted by the masses, but editors and senior journalists mixed with the elites. And they wanted to take their place amongst them as well. The task of moving journalism from trade to profession, and so from the company of plumbers to that of lawyers had begun. And central to this project was the growth in Journalism in Universities.
Tradespeople have apprenticeships. But professionals have Degrees, and Masters Degrees, and the potential to collect the whole dancing alphabet of respectability at the end of their names. The earliest journalist tycoons realised the importance of this. Columbia's Journalism school was founded with a cash injection from Mr. Pulitzer, whose lavishly illustrated New York paper had brought him immense wealth, but not a lot of invitations to the VanDerBilts' place.
The real question is, why would you want to go to one of these schools?Faced with the need to try to process large quantities of students, and test them in a credibly standardised manner, the schools have fallen back on teaching what they term the craft of journalistic writing. This Wall Street Journal article gives some idea of how even the heads of the Universities themselves are questioning the value of this kind of teaching.
But one of the things not dealt with by the Wall Street Journal is the deadening effect a generation of Journalism Schooling has had on American public writing. The writers are told to write in a certain way, because the Editors learnt that this was the way to do it at their prestigious school. If they attempt to inject a little life into the piece, it will be edited out, and they will likely be considered unprofessional in their outlook by the people who commission them.
Dave Cullen's Duelling Leads piece, highlighted by Scott Rosenberg a few weeks ago, is a supreme example of the effect of this dead hand on the American reading public. An interesting opener replaced by a paragraph which could have been written by a computer.
This damages the reader, who loses the potential of being entertained and discovering a new voice in their newspaper. It damages the writer, who is both dissuaded from writing imaginatively again, and also embarrassed to find such pedestrian prose published with their name on it. And eventually it will damage the newspaper as people get bored reading the same old stuff and writers tire of writing it . Particularly if that stuff just conforms to a set of abstract conventions, and doesn't reflect changes in how people speak to each other.
I'll probably come back to this, but I'd be particularly interested in hearing from North Americans who feel that they don't recognise their experience of life in their papers.
S
11:57:12 AM 
