Journalism and Storytelling

Unfortunately the economics of journalism push it into entertainment. Opinions (called columns) are cheaper than news as on columnist can crank out an opinion (based on the news of others) every day without leaving the office. Editorials ditto. Big colour pictures are cheap. Add a few token journalists that crawl around writing “in depth” stories about whatever place they are in when the story is due and you can call it a paper. The need to get linear inches from each live journalist employed, even if they didn’t uncover anything of interest that day, encourages storytelling – the making of a story out of nothing at all – which is what we get. —Geoffrey Rockwell —Journalism and Storytelling (grockwel: Research Notes)