Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

My dad, a lifelong journalist, once told me that some weird stuff gets into a newspaper between Christmas and New Years.  He attributed the strange stories to a year-end lull in the news cycle, when nothing much is happening, but the publisher still has all those column inches to fill each day.

Maybe that's why the Journal Star got all "meta" on us today, with an above-the-fold, front-page story whose headline asked "How Did This Paper Get Here?"   (Ironic that the Journal-Star will okay a front-page story about how the paper is made but has yet to report on all the layoffs that recently took place there).  Talk about a slow news day . . . .

That said, having once worked at 926 "P" St. myself, I actually do find it interesting to consider the back story of all those front-page stories, the mechanical-engineering wizardry that goes into producing a newspaper.  When I worked in the Newspaper in Education department (can you call a two-person operation a "department?"), my favorite part of our standard tour was in the production plant, with its incomprehensibly large vats of cyan, yellow, magenta and key (read "black") inks, and the Industrial-Age feel of the web press, as it folded and spindled while not quite mutilating the daily paper.  It was a sight to behold.

. . . but back to the content of those year-end newspapers.

How, exactly, is a newspaper editor in today's world supposed to help readers discern between the newsworthy and the whimsical, when we have a buffoon leading the polls and dominating the headlines?  I would argue that at least some of the readers' confusion lay at the feet of the editors themselves, who too often have supplanted professional discernment (or what we once called journalism's "gatekeeper" duties) with a hunger for clicks and "likes."

My God.  Could you imagine what would happen in education if its leaders took a similar approach?

"Today, students, we will begin our research project, applying critical pedagogy to the belief that Chuck Norris, indeed, once made a Happy Meal cry."

My dad--a funny, wise, bridge-building man who also happened to be a heck of a journalist--died 22 years ago.  In those 22 years, I  have mourned the deaths of too many other wordsmiths whom I admire--Molly Ivans, Charles Kuralt,  Bill Kloefkorn, and Leon Satterfield, among others.

Today, though, I mourn something larger than these fine writers--I mourn the meme-saturated, RIF-frenzied, profit-obsessed machine that is eating journalism.  Like the Samurai from the movie "Brazil," this garbled behemoth burps out end-of-year strangeness all year long.  And we just keep eating it, convinced that it can sustain us.