Thoughts on US News

A response to CR’s question yesterday about Neil Mcintosh’s and Nick Denton’s thoughts on the US media:

Here’s what Neil Mcintosh, head of editorial development for guardian.co.uk, had to say about US newspapers:

Taking a copy of the LA Times as an example, simply because it’s local and handy and described by one participant as the West coast’s most important news source, you have to say things could be better. For instance, this front page tale about safety checks on US airliners isn’t sure if it’s a human interest, business, aviation or travel story, and ends up being none of the above - at huge length. It sat, on the front page, alongside a long apology for, and probe into, a reporting cock-up on a story about an attack on rapper Tupak Shakur, also delivered at remarkable length.

Both stories were run without the design tricks we’re used to in Europe - big photographs, graphics, breakout panels. Because every angle had to fit inone long run of copy they struggled, structurally. Both were, as a consequence, real chores to read. They show, I’d suggest, that it’s not just the internet that’s driving readers away from print.

Neil has a point. I have more than once turned a page in the New York Times to be confronted by column after column of solid text and thought “I just don’t have the time for this.” But I’d hazard a guess there is something else at play in Neil’s analysis—and that is the fact that it takes time to learn how to read certain publications.

When I first arrived in America in 2003, I used to scream at my New York Times almost every morning. I’d rail at its winding sixty-word intros and at stories that didn’t get to the point until the penultimate paragraph. But a couple of years ago, I realized that I was finding less and less fault with the paper. Could it possibly be that the Times was a-changing? The answer, of course, was no. I had just grown used to reading it.

I had a similar experience with magazines. For months, the dozens of adverts at the beginning of Vanity Fair literally stopped me from reading the rest of the magazine until I learned that you have to dive in halfway through in order to get to the juicy bits. Likewise, the New Yorker’s acres and acres of print seemed like a weekly chore until I learned the only way to tackle it was to read the table of contents first and cherry pick the stories that interested me.

The funny thing is that when I left England a few years ago I thought of British journalism as the highest form in the world. Four and a half years on, I find it hard to read a UK newspaper cover to cover. The style is often so formulaic that it’s boring, and so simplified and full of hyperbole that it is often flat out wrong. Far more UK stories seem to be based on press releases and press conferences than you would find in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Plus, there seems to be no room in the UK for the kind of journalism that I so enjoy nowadays, like the Times’ nuanced and insightful ‘journal’ reports from around the world (such as Sarah Lyall’s UK reporting) or entertaining and informed commentary by writers like David Carr. And it’s not just the NYT. Is there a UK newspaper that can match the New York Post’s Page Six? Or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages?

But my point is not that one form is better than the other. They are just different. Give me a couple of years back in England, and I will probably have relearned how to scan the Guardian, the Times, the Mail and the Sun, and I will be left wondering how I ever got through the Times, the Journal, the Post and the Daily News every day.

Whichever style may be better, neither is likely to win back newspapers’ ever-dwindling readership. The problem, as Nick Denton pointed out, is that a few decades ago newspapers faced very little competition. All they had to do was please most of the people all of the time and their place in a city or region was secure.

But today the audience is fractured. The best websites and cable news stations are successful because they please some of the people all of the time. And as that audience is drawn away to places like the Huffington Post and Fox News, large organizations like the New York Times are left fighting over an ever-dwindling piece of the pie. No amount of punchy intros and fancy graphics is going to stem the losses.

Related:
UK Views on US News (EiNY)