The head’s the thing . . .

. . .  followed by the lede (opening sentence). They sell stories. So editors look to heads and ledes. Advice to them: send your copy desk to word school. Put them to reading verse, including blank verse such as this from Poetry for October:

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! . . . . She -

just kept her thoughts to herself. She just -

followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off.

Look. If that’s not to your liking, have them read E.B. White or Joseph Addison. Whatever you do, promote language, so that your front page does not have this for a head:

Economy’s political sway shifts

followed by the (not) clipped and biting:

Seemingly positive numbers don’t guarantee boost to party in power

Look, it’s not an ax murder, salable on its face. It’s the economy, and I won’t, a la James Carville, add “stupid.” Or is it? Look to the lede:

With so much change sweeping America’s workforce, the Republicans are discovering it is not necessarily easy to gain political traction from a generally favorable economy.

Is this what you call punching up the news? Are discovering? Not necessarily easy? Political traction? Reader, pay attention. Your mind wanders. It’s your daily Trib before you. Wake up. The second ‘graf, a logical enough follow-through:

The October jobs report showed unemployment fell from 4.6 percent to 4.4 percent, while employers added 92,000 non-farm jobs to their payrolls. Also, the government revised upward the number of jobs created in August and September.

Unemployment down, new jobs, more than we thought! We’re getting somewhere now, except for punching down the news, which is not that the report showed something or government revised something, both subjects of their sentences when they should be add-ons: according to the report, the government said, etc. Does the writer, William Neikirk, think the news is that a report showed or government revised? If so, he’s been too long in Washington, whence this story comes.

Anyhow, we haven’t yet got to the good part, as apparently understood by the writer and contained in the third ‘graf:

But structural changes that have roiled the job market in recent years have changed the meaning of these numbers for many Americans, particularly less-skilled workers who are finding it more difficult to remain in the middle class.

Is this the lede he wishes he could have used, describing as it does the cloudy lining of the silver cloud? It’s as if Neikirk couldn’t bring himself to blare forth this excellent pre-election news.

Maybe that’s what makes his exposition weak and flabby. He may be conflicted, poor fellow, desiring but not quite willing to announce to his readers that this excellent economic news doesn’t matter, because this year it’s not the economy (stupid), which it used to be when Democrat James Carville said it was.

Buying the farm

Chi Trib has a Wash Post piece on the left column, front page, and an NYT piece on the right, which is what you call cost efficiency — they bought the services, why not use them? — in an age of shrinking circulation, worse than reported, by the way.

The first story has the head “Study: A world without seafood,” which is alarming, to be sure.  We have until 2048, say 14 researchers from Canada, Panama, Sweden and the U.S. writing in Science mag.

“We really see the end of the line now,” said lead author Boris Worm [sic], a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University,

It’s not that bad, say some, including a fishing industry group that suggests “aquaculture,” farming fish as we farm grain, as a solution.  Bad idea, say the scientists, one of whom objects to its artificiality:

“It’s like turning on the air conditioning rather than opening the window,” said Stanford University marine sciences professor Stephen Palumbi, one of the paper’s authors.

But we do that sort of thing and live better because of it, do we not?  Was the argument used once against farming in general because people lived on what they could gather? 

Anyhow, assuming the problem is as urgent as they say, it would be solved if only . . .  If only what?  Article doesn’t say.

The NYT story is about our government’s posting nuclear-weaponry info on a web site which the Iranians viewed and learned from.  It’s a story broken by NYT and widely distributed — Google News says in 351 articles.  So Trib’s going with it may be a sort of cost-efficiency windfall for which no man should blame them, least of all one as fair-minded as I.

On the other hand, the top half of page three — and this is a broadsheet, remember, with lots of page three to be half of — is NYT with “Iraq investigator’s job eliminated,” about ending oversight of construction work; all of page six except a big ad, given to two AP stories, “Russian Tea Room hopes for . . . “ and “Evangelical Leader quits . . . ,“ followed in the rest of Section one by seven more AP and two LA Times stories, not counting shorts.  All nicely presented, with pix galore. 

Maybe this has been standard for some time, but it does seem that farming out is rather important to Chi Trib, if not to scientists with an eye to our fish supply.

Obama besmirched

Barack Obama, in the news a lot, but not for audaciously hoping.  Rather, he’s in it for taking a favor from Illinois’ currently best known indicted political insider.

Chi Trib’s John Kass explains it pithily here, following on yesterday’s Chi Trib reporting. Sun-Times’s Mark Brown explains it here.  Upshot is, O. dipped a toe into corruption of the sort he condemned in Africa or didn’t know what he was doing, either of which tend to smudge the image that attaches to a presumably idealistic newcomer with “the flawless, unlined visage of a carefree young movie idol.”

There’s another matter, his falling into line with the presumably non-idealistic old-timers when it comes to local politics, specifically his failure to endorse a fellow Dem reform candidate in the primary last April followed by his endorsement of the feckless, reportedly hapless son of an old-timer now incapacitated and unable to run.  Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn gives this the attention it deserves.

Nervous from the service

In this we have Sy Hersh letting his hair down for some Canadians. A good editor would take him off the war beat and put him to covering tennis somewhere. He has forsaken journalism for advocacy. Not the first to do so, there will be others. But he is clearly a guy who knows what the story is before he writes it. He needs some surprises. It will be better for all of us.