In Ann Arbor
today, as on most days since late December, the snow that dominates the view
from our kitchen window and the well-below freezing temperatures that go with
it are the most important topics of the day. As I have almost every morning for
more years than I care to admit, I unfold my reading rack and place the first
section of the Times on it. But as I drizzle honey on my granola and prepare to
pour my first cup of coffee, I see this troubling headline on the front page,
“Accidents Surge As Oil Industry Takes the Train.” I want to know more so I
read down to the bottom and learn about breakfast at Kerry’s Kitchen in a small
town in North Dakota
where comfort food, especially freshly baked caramel rolls, is the order of
the day.
I took a large spoonful of cereal, topped with fresh fruit
and raisins and sipped some coffee. Then, I learned that the trains the
headline alluded to rumble by the diner’s window seven times a day, and that
sometime last month one of them had a fiery accident that caused evacuation of
the town. That’s what I learned by reading a little over three and a half
column inches. Naturally, my curiosity was whetted, but I couldn’t learn more
without removing the paper from the rack, unfolding it (I can’t believe the
Times doesn’t know what its readers are acutely aware of, that turning pages of
the Times requires care and skills best developed on the subway, as it wends
its way through the tunnels and bridges that take one from an apartment in
Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, something I did over fifty years ago).
I took another sip of coffee to wash down the bits of flax
seed that had begun to cover my teeth so I could turn to the jump page and
follow the story.
On page 18, I find the history of the practice that led to
the accidents alluded to by the headline, and finally get the actual facts after
I have made it through another 2 ½ column inches.
I decided to make a complaint, so I told my girlfriend, to
whom I do most of my whining, and she told me of the Public Editor’s piece in
today’s Week in Review, for which I thank you. But this particular story is
polluted not only by interpretation, but by irrelevant “human interest” details
that keep me from what once might have been called “news.”
The effort involved in turning pages of the Times is
considerable and the possibility that it will be fruitful can’t be estimated
until you’ve actually done it. This is not fair to print edition readers. At Erasmus Hall High School
I took two terms of journalism from Erna Fleischer, and learned the inverted
pyramid system of writing news stories and the reasons for it. It seems to me
that the print edition of a broad-sheet newspaper should, for the most part, follow
that plan.
Perhaps you think that readers don’t need details because
they get them from TV, radio and internet, but that doesn’t apply to me. If it
did, I might cancel my subscription to the hard copy paper and save myself over
$600.00 per year because it would render your paper irrelevant.
I hope your column today bears fruit so that I can continue to look to the Times as my primary news source.
