Interesting post --

A few things concern me, though --

For one -- the discussion of the working class that takes place places like this... how is it that in this forum this always seems so us and them? I don't think that's right... us is us -- all of us. The tabloid format is, indeed, generated for the working class -- because the working class more often takes public transportation and therefore has not the time or space to linger over the many folds of a traditional format paper. The tabloid can be held while riding, and easily navigated up and down and front and back -- many times these papers work from both ends into the middle for the same reason. In Chicago, where I went to journalism school, the tabloid is the liberal paper and the Tribune, the classic fold out, is the conservative and more reactionary paper -- this was extremely confusing coming from Boston and New York, and I never did quite warm up to the journalistic landscape there (thought the buildings are beautiful.)

Yellow journalism, while it's recent implications are mainly entertainment oriented, was an important foundation of investigative reporting.

But most importantly, the form of journalistic writing is not poetic, it's true -- but the idea that it is a flattening of everything, while understandable, misses the point. It's not prose -- it's not cold. The tenants of the impartial observer -- however flawed -- are the best every day narrative of our society. Just as the poets write of the life of things, it is important that journalists write of the things of life. Otherwise we would, in fact, know nothing of what the shooting of a foot is like at all if we haven't experienced it -- so many important societal changes have come at the hands of journalist. It's vital to the health of our society -- and I have said before and will again that the current trend of disregard for the field of journalism may well be the best tool of propaganda our government has mastered.

Why anyone still gets their news from dead-tree editions is beyond me (said the 26-year-old). To me there are few things more depressing than a printed newspaper, no matter how it's folded. On the morning train today I was reading Sister Carrie. I read the news when I sit down at my computer at work.

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for your comments. Oversimsplications are often annoying and cannot always be explained away as irony. I'm not endorsing the us and them bifurcation, but simply stating a fact of life. For political and commercial reasons, we've been shoehorned into a black and white world (created by them). At 44, l've spent much of life in blue collar jobs and still use the buses and subways as my ONLY modes of transportation. And yes, I'm also partial to tabloids, which I admit to with a straight face.

Linh

Strangely, it was not so long after the newspaper wars yielded The Yellow Kid that Adolph Ochs of The New York Times (reflecting, as Karen Leick recently put it in her article, "Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press," a "growing sense [at the time] in the United States that literature was for everybody, not just the elite") said: "books themselves are news and therefore within the province of the newspaper."

Hi Don,

Then comes the paperback in 1935... But the web, which is most universal and most convenient, at least in developed countries, has only fostered a certain type of reading. People read and write more than ever but the casual, frantic pace of the internet has infected everyone's reading and writing habits, I fear.

Jennifer, The disregard that the press has earned has been fully earned. The Poetry Foundation blog is probably not the place to go into it, but the "objective" press did a terrible job during the 2000 election and in the wake of 9/11, and has not improved a great amount since.
That said, I more-or-less agree with you. Go press! Do your jobs better!

Linh, interesting post! A very nice insight nicely put -- the juxtaposition of deflational journalese and inflational ad-blather. And you're right about casual and frantic. "Casually frantic" would be a great name for a blog . . .

Don, Ochs also assigned an editor of the Book Review to answer readers' queries. (Can you imagine -- a poem researcher employed at a newspaper?) After 15 years on the job, the original editor, Hazel Felleman, compiled a book of "The Best Loved Poems of the American People," using her experience answering queries as her guide as to which 600-some poems to include. Published in 1936, it has never gone out of print. No modernism, but tons of great stuff. Most represented poet: the great "Unknown."
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Loved-Poems-American-People/dp/0385000197

This is a sidenote regarding newspapers: the main character in a short story I long ago read,
believing old news is good news, never looked at a newspaper until a day or more after
the day it was published.

As to the "frantic pace of the internet", I have yet to read an entire book online;
but I do read articles, essays, reviews, blog posts, the comments beneath
a blog post (if there are not too many), poems, and selections from books.
I also listen to videos that interest me. Books I read at home.

Even though I sometimes feel overwhelmed, I know the Internet has been
and will continue to be--for as long as I am able to use it--a wondrous university for
this somwhat homebound character I am.

John, thanks for bring up Felleman! No modernism, indeedy, in Best Loved... - but what's fascinating about the 1920's is the extent to which modernist literature was on the radar (sorry for the anachronism!) of the mainstream American media of the 20s and 30s. Though the little magazines in which modernist work appeared (e.g., Poetry, Little Review, Broom, translatlantic review, transition) had only a few thousand subscribers, the most popular magazines and newspapers in America took note of what appeared in them: Life, Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, McClure's, Red Book, McCall's, NYT, Chicago Evening Post, Chicago Daily Tribune, Boston Transcript, Baltimore Sun, St. Louis Post Dispatch.... In fact the Chicago Daily Tribune printed 19 sections of Stein's Tender Buttons! Stein, Eliot, Cummings, Barnes, and others all appeared in Vanity Fair! To be sure, much of the response in the mainstream press was negative (many parodies were published); but the point is that many Americans were aware of modernist work. As Leick (from whose work I get all this info) points out, Four Saints in Three Acts was a Broadway hit, and even as late as 1948, Eliot gave a reading in Minneapolis attended by, get this: 13,700 people!

Scholars, Leick concludes, are "unaware that mainstream Americans were familiar with the work of [modernists] thanks to the tremendous attention literary columnists paid to little magazines."

Perhaps the Internet brings new work to millions of eyes.... but not to those in mainstream heads - yet!!