It must be time for me to bitch about The Atlantic. Actually this month, not so much--pretty good range of articles and reviews, and James Fallows has been relegated to one sad little page of "OMG there's still time for us to loooooooose in Eye-Rack, WTFBBQEleven!!!11" so that's a plus. Cover art? Still ominous in that Jackbooted Thugs Are Going to Eat You and Your Little Dog, Too™ way, but there aren't any actual dead bodies on the cover, so maybe the incipient spring thaw has raised spirits in the art department.
But. You knew there'd be a but, didn't you? The feature story irritated the crap out of me, and not for the reason's you'd think. See, its a feature called "Host," which purports to unravel the great mysteries of talk radio. Well, whatever. I managed to get past the writer's incredulity that radio is a ruthless business and not a vast political conspiracy, because that's frankly the take I expected. Again, whatever. But the thing that irritated the snot out of me was the "look ma! I'm cleverly using color-coordinated sidebars to simultaneously insert myself into the story and show you how High-Larious I am! Woo-hoo! All I need is a quart of tequila and a few hits of acid and I'm Hunter Thompson!"
I don't read news articles for my daily dose of Too Clever By Half. That's what op-eds and blogs are for. Ostensibly, feature articles in serious magazines should be informative. If the article is 12 pages long and only 6 of those pages are dedicated to, oh, I don't know, actual information, then maybe SOMEONE at The Atlantic could have said, "Umm, dude? Can we go just a bit lighter on the 'amusing personal anecdote that highlights the insanity of this crazy host fellow followed by 3 sidebar paragraphs of personal opinion that you'll read because some of the sidebars actually elucidated terminology so you're totally sucked in and at my mercy' stuff and get to the point?" I think the person who normally fulfills this function is called an "editor," but since I don't work for The Atlantic, who knows? Maybe they don't have them there.
Look, I'm fairly media savvy. I know where to go to get the information I need, which is good because I don't have a lot of time to wade through chaff to get to the wheat. Hunter Thompson's legacy has created a helluva lot more chaff to wade through, and I'm more than a little unappreciative.
Let me put it bluntly: reporters? I don't care about you, your life or your experiences. If I did, I'd read your autobiography. If I want your opinions, I'll read your op-eds or your blogs. But this idea that you're somehow as exciting as the subject you're writing about? It's wrong. So very wrong on so many levels that I'm not sure there are enough hours in the day for me to explain the wrongness.
And editors? Stop acting like the parents of the disruptive toddler who think the behavior is "cute" and so encourage the little beast to continue. Either that, or institute a warning label on feature stories that merely "feature" the reporter. It could be something simple, like:
WARNING: NARCISSTIC CONTENT
Those of us with busy lives would then be able to pick and choose our reading accordingly. Just a thought.
There's not much wading with chaff as winnowing. There's also dirt, broken kernals, weed seeds, bits of stem and leaf, and odd unidentified stuff.
Basically you thresh to loosen everything up, wait for a suitable wind, throw the mixture up, and the junk blows away and the kernels drop straight down and are eaten by rats.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at March 11, 2005 01:48 PMI thought the color-coded links were a lame effort at replicating the functionality of a web page.
I have no idea why the magazine didn't kill the story. It added nothing to my understanding of radio.
Posted by: liz at March 15, 2005 03:00 AM