Fan Dancers on the Front Page   

Readers are hungry for engaging, entertaining stories.

Spare time? Please. Finding some these days is about as likely as finding Brigadoon. But when I do manage to steal a day or two, I'm enjoying a guilty pleasure--researching a book about the late and inimitably great writer Joseph Mitchell.

Journalists of a certain age commonly cite Mitchell as a major influence, and he is widely considered one of the most significant literary journalists of the 20th century. He was a champion of the uncelebrated and unwashed, a kind of prose descendent of Walt Whitman, although his truer inspiration was Joyce. Unfortunately, younger journalists are more apt to know Mitchell, if they have heard of him at all, for what he wasn't writing during all those last years at The New Yorker. (It wasn't really writer's block--he was actually quite creative well into his 80s--but that's another column.)

So some of you might be astonished to learn that at the beginning of his career, in the '30s, Joe Mitchell was a New York City newspaperman so prolific as to defy belief. His most prominent work appeared in the World-Telegram. As a page-one feature writer there, he cranked out what were basically 1,000-word spot short stories, virtually every day.

He gathered many of his favorites in a book titled "My Ears Are Bent," first published in 1938 and reissued in 2001 by Pantheon. Flip to almost any page and you will find passages that delight. Like this lead:

"Sally Rand, the lithe, hearty siren from a Missouri corn farm, who has faced prison sentences, horse-whippings, and a fate worse than death in her tumultuous career as the nation's original fan dancer, sat on a divan in her black and silver dressing room at Brooklyn's Paramount Theatre and slowly rolled the flesh-colored stockings off her celebrated legs."

That's a story I would read, as did hundreds of thousands of World-Telegram customers. So popular were Mitchell's dispatches that the paper plastered him on the billboards of its circulation trucks.

Mitchell seemed incapable of writing a dull sentence. Here he recalls the Kingfish, Huey Long: "The last time I saw him he was sitting up in bed in the Waldorf-Astoria with a hangover.... There were three reporters in the room asking him questions. To every question he would say, 'It's a lie,' and laugh throatily."

All this came to mind as I was reading Carl Stepp's story, in the last issue of AJR, about the groundbreaking research on newspaper readership that is being conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America. I commend both the piece ("Why Do People Read Newspapers?") and the research to anyone who cares about newspapers and their survival.

Some of what they have learned is surprising but much of it is not. Readers are hungry for more analysis and context. They want more local news--including stories about their governments--more sports, more health and lifestyle, more science, and more stories that answer the question, "How does this affect me?"

And they want stories that are written in a more engaging, entertaining style. Almost 70 years ago Joe Mitchell and armies of less exalted talents were doing just that. To some extent we need to go back to the future. It's OK to put Sally Rand's legs back on the front page, as long as you do it with the same flair she brought to her fan dance.

You may detect a theme in the research: More is better. Indeed, aside from crime news, of which they are clearly weary, readers want more of just about everything. And that raises a fundamental paradox that I hope ASNE and NAA members are recognizing. Over the past two decades, the news industry, in its pursuit of short-term earnings, has tried to make changes by addition and subtraction--covering one beat only by killing another. But readers are not interested in that cynical calculus. They want it all.

I note that in the same issue in which AJR outlined the ASNE-NAA research, it also reported on what Dean Singleton is doing with his flagship paper, the Denver Post. Singleton, once the cost-slashing enfant terrible of the industry, has apparently had a Saul-like conversion and is now preaching the gospel of editorial investment. Believe his sincerity or not, but there is no denying the statistics--almost 50 more newsroom bodies in the past three years, a 30 percent bump in newsroom spending in that same period. Granted the paper was starting from a stingier base, but it's investment nevertheless.

Dean Singleton is nobody's fool. My guess is that he would kill to have Joe Mitchell writing on his front page, and if you are an owner, publisher or editor, so should you.