This has got to be the worst example of paint-by-numbers newswriting I’ve seen in, if not forever, at least a good long while–since, maybe, journalism school?
“It began like any other morning on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, that was, until a wall came tumbling down onto Broadway.”
A total waste of pixels (online version) or breath (it’s from a TV station). They’re trying to be dramatic, and all they are is trite. Try to imagine a news story that couldn’t open the same way: “It began like any other morning on the beach at Normandy, that was, until the Allied invasion force landed.” “It began like any other morning on the moon, that was, until the Lunar Excursion Module touched down.”
My journalism professor, who got his start in the 1940s writing for Chicago newspapers and was a firm believer in the old-fashioned inverted pyramid, called this “Time Magazine” writing, and he didn’t mean it kindly.
The classic example I still remember (though I’m not sure if he said it or it was in a textbook), was how Time Magazine would cover a nuclear war: “On a morning not too long ago, Phyllis Dortmeyer, 78, couldn’t find her kitten. Unknown to her, her cat, like hundreds of millions of other animals and humans, had been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust the night before.”
I seem to recall there was also a National Enquirer headline for the same event: “Nuclear War Breaks Out! Michael Jackson, 600 million others, dead!”
“It began like any other morning…” indeed. Piffle. Forget the amateur dramatics and just give me the facts.
