DREARY NEWS

HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR

The New York Post is one of those newspapers that news junkies and talking heads turn their noses up at. It tends to print sensationalistic news, it has headlines like "Rums Felled" to announce the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. It is the kind of paper that has lots of pictures on the front page and little print, like the kind in the UK that has topless girls on page 3.

So why is it the only newspaper in the New York City market that is gaining circulation instead of losing? Why is it one of the only newspapers in the country to show a record increase in circulation in a time when industry analysts are noting a constant downtrend in readership and subscription to newspapers overall?

The editor Col Allen has some thoughts on the matter, thoughts I've tried to take to heart when I work on my blog:

"One of the things I’ve done at the Post is constantly ask everybody to listen to the market, to listen to their readers,” Allan says. “It’s a different approach than you generally see here in the US. Too many editors and too many journalists here feel that they have been ‘chosen’, that their view of the news and their opinions are what the readers should have. My approach is completely different. I try to listen to the readers and hear what they want from us. Then I work hard to give it to them."

Allan says humour is the classic example. “We say a feeling of wellbeing and happiness is a good thing, so we work hard to make people have a laugh everyday,” he says. “But you go through the papers in this country and it’s amazing just how absolutely humourless they are.

"Humour doesn’t mean you can’t be serious about news and politics and crime and everything else. But they have a problem with it because of this arrogant notion that it may make them look less important to their readers. The price of this arrogance is that folks are turning off. And worse still, the editors are then turning around and blaming the internet. What they should be doing is working harder to produce newspapers that people actually want to consume and enjoy and have fun with.

"I was just talking to a guy from The New York Times who asked me if papers are losing their readers to the internet. I told him that might be true for papers like his, but not for mine and not for the Daily News.

"He asked me what I meant about the Daily News and I said: ‘Well, if they worked harder to make papers that weren’t so f---ing dreary, they might have a better time of it."

I believe that is correct. Newspapers and news reporting have become like lifting a tombstone, it's a struggle to even want to look at them, and they remind you only of misery, death, and fear. Any good news is constantly wrapped in disclaimers that explain how this really isn't all that good anyway. Part of the reason - a reason I think will change soon - that the news has gotten more and more miserable for years is twofold.

First, the people who work on newspapers are in the great majority leftwing politically and vote Democrat. For about 12 years, there hasn't been much good news for Democrats, and because of that, they tend to be depressed. Think about it, if you are conservative, in all likelihood you didn't wake up to the election results with a song in your heart and sunshine on your shoulder. Imagine facing that almost every election for over a decade with no hope in sight. That would affect your work, your outlook, and your interpretation of events.

Second, the press hates President Bush, and some fear him. Not that he's such a fearsome sort, but rather because he's socially conservative and openly Christian, so he must be dangerous, one step away from throwing everyone who isn't Christian in a gulag, a tyrant just barely contained by heroic newsmen and a minority in congress. Their reporting was almost totally lockstep after 2003, almost nothing that was in any slightest sense beneficial or helpful to the president made it through the wall of ideology. Even good news like the booming economy was spun to seem not so good: a report on CNN of the record low jobless numbers was accompanied by a picture of a McDonalds. The record DOW market was spun as excitement for a Democrat takeover of congress. The growth numbers were hedged by warnings of inflation.

That makes the news pretty dreary, even if it didn't have a tendency to be overly self-important and focus on the negative to begin with. Face it, reporters tend to try to find and are excited most by bad news and ghastly events. If it bleeds, it leads, they cry, and anything woeful is certain to get noticed.

I'm reminded me of a Public Service Announcement that a comedy troupe put out once, it was just like any of a score that you've seen, about wall outlets. It was incredibly dire and horrifying, and at the end it said "brought to you by the council to scare the hell out of you." Too often it seems like that's the idea behind much reporting: ways to terrify you.

So yes, dreary is a good word to describe it. And I'll try to be at least less dreary than the news.

tip of the bush hat to Tim Blair for the story

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