Word: lindstroms
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...have always been depressed by books about newspapers. Theodore Bernstein's Watch Your Language, while delightfully written and all that, was really a high school English book, and Carl J. Lindstrom's The Fading American Newspaper demonstrated what is wrong with American journalism more by its own soporific style than by the points it raised...
...being told well it is in the great dailies like the Times. Unlike the sloppy material that comes over the Associated Press wire, a Times story is not constructed to be chopped off after any paragraph. It is not just simple writing; it is good writing (and, although Lindstrom does not recognize it, there is a difference between simplicity and quality). But the chief virtue of the Times is the very bulk and solidity that frighten away some prospective readers...
...daily newspaper remains the only medium both big enough and fast enough to keep the public informed. The reason so few papers have lived up to their function (or perhaps one should properly call it their responsibility) is, as Lindstrom repeatedly notes, that journalism has come to be treated as a business, not as a profession. Last fall, at a CRIMSON dinner for editors of secondary school newspapers, the head of the Boston Associated Press bureau spoke on journalism as a career, referring to it always as the "news business." Journalism at its best is a profession, and an honorable...
...absentee owner is not a citizen, and therefore chains (or "groups" as some sensitive owners like to call them) are not good for newspapers, for local autonomy within a chain is always an illusion, as Lindstrom shows in his case study of the Hartford Times under Gannett chain ownership. But the chain is not the only source of weakness: neither the Boston Globe nor the Boston Herald is a chain paper; yet they have grown as fat and lazy as any chain or monopoly sheet...
...fault is not entirely with the chains nor entirely with the one-paper cities. It is, once again, a question of attitude and professional pride. And although Lindstrom throws a few arrows where they are not deserved (notably at the trend toward "interpretive writing") and a few compliments where they have not been earned, his book is a useful assault of the complacent "news business." Of course, it is doubtful that anyone will give him the respectful hearing his complaints merit. When he expressed a few of his opinions in speeches while still Executive Editor of the Hartford Times, Lindstrom...