Posted
8:37 AM
by Gene
Another reason we MUST have MORE reporters earning MORE money doing MORE work: thumbsuckers. An ordinary Web surfer like me can glean the fats and draw his own conclusions, but the devoted news hack won't do that: he must turn a one-graf story into twenty grafs of rehash, citing the usual overeager sound-byte providers, flat-footedly trying to avoid the obviously while stumbling face first into it. As more than one person has said, most papers could further reduce their staffs and most readers wouldn't know the difference. If thumbsuckers disappeared from newspapers tomorrow we wouldn't know -- and we wouldn't care.