Newspapers

Pictures or Prose?

    I still enjoy reading the paper newspapers and hate to see them go. I have noticed lately, however, that the printed ones are becoming more like the electronic ones, in that images and illustrations are occupying the spaces formerly reserved for sentences and paragraphs. The good news, I suppose, is that now what we see in the papers resembles so closely what we view on the screen, maybe we won’t miss them so much when they are gone.

Before

    This is what newspapers used to look like.

After

   Here is what they now look like. Presented below is a picture of the front page of “Canada’s National Newspaper” (The Globe and Mail) as it appeared on April 29, 2017. I apologize for the quality of the image, but can assure you that there are very few words provided within it. The same was true for many of the pages of the other sections and apart from the images illustrating the stories there were the pictures contained in the advertisements. The entire back page of one section was an ad related to Prostate Cancer Canada, but I am happy to report that the large picture cleverly avoided showing what you might expect. (I am not picking on The Globe; the other papers are the same and then there are the tabloids where most of the words are found mainly in captions.)

Progress?

    I ran across the following comment a while back and while I am not sure if it is true, it is interesting:   

      “In 1900, each page of The Times held twice as many words as in 1987”.

Given what has happened over the past 30 years we may want to consider a “Moore’s Law” for newspapers (that’s the one for computers that says the number of transistors on a chip will double every year.) We could call it “Less’s Law” and say it predicts that the number of words on a newspaper page will be halved each year.

“All the News That’s Fit to Picture”

    Perhaps The New York Times will have to soon alter the motto - “All The News That’s Fit to Print” - and they are welcome to the one above as a replacement.

Sources: The quotation about the number of words in The Times is found in: The First Cuckoo (which is a compilation of letters to that paper and I will soon say more about it.)

P.S. One can argue that in the past, more words did not necessarily mean more thoughtful commentary. Many of the words were devoted to such things as shipping intelligence and “agony columns” and sensational stories were not excluded.

There is some irony in the fact that now that the printing costs associated with paper and ink have been largely eliminated and space no longer an issue, we may only get more pictures and less words.

On the other hand, some argue that too many words are the problem. “One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.” see: ”Cut This Story: Newspaper Articles Are Too Long,” Michael Kinsley, Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2010.

Perhaps he thinks a picture is worth a thousand words.