Emulate the better Gettysburg address

Long, windy stories threaten to be the death of newspapers

By Clark Hoyt

What if the Gettysburg Address had started like this? m m m m m m m m“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.”

Actually, the Gettysburg Address did start that way. No, not Abraham Lincoln’s — the other Gettysburg Address, the two-hour, 13,609-word oration delivered by Edward Everett as Lincoln sat huddled in the cold, waiting his turn that November day in 1863.

As a newspaper contest judge these past several weeks, I think I know how Lincoln must have felt. Will they never get to the point? Will it ever be over?

Let me get to my point: Long, windy stories threaten to be the death of newspapers. We must do something to encourage what newspaper readers want — sharply focused, tightly written pieces that get on, and off, the stage quickly.

I read some terrific journalism entered in the ASNE Writing Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. There were stories that made me laugh (far too few), stories that brought tears to my eyes, stories that challenged me to think hard about the treatment of mentally ill children, race relations and AIDS in Africa. But, there wasn’t a single story that couldn’t have benefited from an editor’s scalpel. Not one. For many, a chainsaw would have been better.

Let me tell you about one story entered in a breaking news category. This story is from an excellent newspaper for which I have great respect. It reported the verdict in the murder trial of a teenager accused of killing her mother. The story was more than 2,000 words long, and the writers didn’t get around to telling you guilty or not guilty until the 112th paragraph. The first six paragraphs recounted a shopping trip by the girl’s lawyers the evening before the verdict. They bought her a baby pink sweater set. By the jump, someone who was apparently the teenager’s grandmother had arrived at the courthouse, and you learned that her pale suit was one of the last outfits she’d packed weeks ago for the trial. Her laundry was piling up.

Reading this story, I felt like a rush-hour motorist trapped in a line of traffic at a rail crossing, waiting for a 200-car freight train to creep past. The difference between the motorist and a newspaper reader is that newspaper readers have a choice. They can just stop reading. (I’ll tell you a dirty little secret: Contest judges stop reading, too. One judge during deliberations over a story concluded by saying, “and I nearly finished it.” And he was praising the piece.)

Contests are supposed to honor the very best work of newspapers. It’s a standing joke that contests are really about the very longest work of newspapers. We all laugh about what wins — three-part, seven-part, 20-part series, entered by the pound. Didn’t Dave Barry once suggest that we could save whole forests if newspapers would just send their entries direct to the Pulitzer committee without bothering to print them?

Journalists love doing this work. But for readers, as Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard has said, the four most discouraging words in a newspaper are “First of a series.”

Research tells us that time-starved readers spend less and less time with newspapers, maybe 15 or 20 minutes a day. The average print reader completes less than 30 percent of an article — and that’s an article she chooses to read. Large numbers of people give “no time to read” as their primary reason for not reading a newspaper.

When Knight Ridder asked nearly 4,000 regular readers of weekday newspapers what would make their paper “a lot better,” 40 percent said better-edited stories that “get to the point more quickly.” (It was tied for first with more stories that are “positive and uplifting,” according to Virginia Dodge Fielder, Knight Ridder’s vice president of research. But that’s a whole different article for The American Editor.)

None of this is new. Yet, in the face of declining newspaper circulation and readership, we go right on churning out projects, series and even single stories that turn away readers in droves with their stupefying length.

An entire newspaper, USA Today, was created around the proposition of short, sharply-written stories and only one jump to a section front. Now, it is the best-selling newspaper in America.

In too many newsrooms, the collective head is in the sand. It is as though editors and reporters picture their audience as a Victorian English family. Father and Mother are seated at the fire, the spaniels sleeping at their feet. The children, chins cupped in their palms, listen raptly as Pater reads aloud the latest piece of narrative journalism from the evening paper.

We wish.

The most encouraging thing to me was the discussion the ASNE Writing Awards judges had at the conclusion of our work.

There was anger about some of the more egregious examples of long, self-indulgent writing. And there was passion about the need to honor short, concise writing.

I believe there was a consensus that next year’s Awards should include a category for short writing, though we didn’t agree on the definition of short.

Just remember, it is Lincoln’s 269 immortal words that are carved in Indiana marble at the end of the great national Mall in Washington, not Everett’s 13,609.

Hoyt, Washington Editor of Knight Ridder, shared the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with Robert S. Boyd of Knight Ridder.