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'Up the Dark Stairs-'
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apark-@aol.com
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Apr 15, 2006 15:39 PDT
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On an e-mail list entirely unrelated to journalism, one member
complained today about an awkwardly written lede ("A man threw a
microwave at his girlfriend, then fatally beat her after she refused to
heat up sandwiches, police said"). The list member's question: "Do
journalists learn how to write?"
Another list member responded with a classic Robert Benchley piece from
Talk of the Town, "Up the Dark Stairs-." The piece is part of the
sample text given by the publisher of "The Fun of It: Stories From The
Talk of the Town," ed. Lillian Ross, and it can be easily found on the
Web; here's one place with simple text:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random042/00068237.html
For those who don't know the Benchley piece, I offer the first two
paragraphs; it gets better.
*****
Among the major menaces to American journalism today (and there are so
many that it hardly seems worth while even beginning this little
article) is the O. Henry-Irvin Cobb tradition. According to this pretty
belief, every reporter is potentially master of the short-story, and
because of it we find Human Interest raising its ugly head in seven out
of every eight news columns and a Human Document being turned out every
time Henry H. Mackle of 1356 Grand Boulevard finds a robin or Mrs.
Rasher Feiman of 425 West Forty-ninth Street attacks the scissors
grinder.
Copy readers in the old days used to insist that all the facts in the
story be bunched together in the opening paragraph. This never made for
a very moving chronicle, but at least you got the idea of what was
going on. Under the new system, where every reporter has his eye on
George Horace Lorimer, you first establish your atmosphere, then shake
a pair of doves out of the handkerchief, round off your lead with a
couple of bars from a Chopin étude, and finally, in the next to last
paragraph, divulge the names and addresses and what it was that
happened.
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