One of the things that was in full-flower back when I was just starting out as an adult, was buying a daily newspaper or two and spending an hour or two reading them.
We did that before news was ruined because it became ratings-driven, not information driven. And before news became manufactured and sensational because due to a drive for ratings it's always on. I read somewhere not long ago, that if you don't work for the state department, there's no reason to check the news more than once a day. Our "age of anxiety" might be directly related to the ginning up of the words "breaking news."
I've always been a newspaper reader. Not just the fancy-schmancy pages of the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but I've always enjoyed local papers, too. When I was in college and the library had fifteen or twenty papers from around the world, I'd often go through a dozen or so of them searching for funny little items and quirky stories. I'd use this page flipping as a way to relax my brain from the onslaught of serious news. Also, I like Blondie and Beetle Bailey and BC and even the Lockhorns.
Back during my college years there was a store along Broadway, I think on the east side of the street between 111th and 112th called "International News." It was a clean, well-lighted place about the size of half a basketball court. It was stuffed to the gills with newspapers and magazines from around the world. Not just seventy-seven varieties of porn, but real periodicals of the type tweed-wearing professors from Columbia would publish in and save. International News had a liberal browsing policy and an attentive but not obstrusive staff. They kept things neat and orderly and didn't mind if you whiled away the hours consultin' with the flowers.
During my five years at Ally & Gargano where the creative department was of the old school, nearly all the writers and art directors were 40 to 50 year old men who would get in around 9, have a cuppa and go through the paper. This was, for the most part, considered an un-interruptible time, not just leisure. We were filling our heads with what was going on in the world. Happenings, trends, ideas that would make us richer, more-informed humans and would therefore make our work richer and better informed as well. The search for simple, timeless human truths is rarely revealed in a sensational blonde-vectored sound-blather.
One of the positive side-effects of reading with regularity a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine is that you got to "know" the writers. You were familiar with their styles and you could collate of list of writers you admired and imitated. These were people you didn't like to miss, people you could learn from.
In those days, from the Times I never missed Anthony Lewis or Russell Baker on the op-ed page. From the sports page, Red Smith and Dave Anderson were musts. The Times had a guy called Phil Dougherty who wrote a five-times-a-week ad column that had more genuine advertising news in each column than the current advertising trade press reveals in a year.
As the written word has more and more disappeared, as more and more people consume spoken media and do less and less reading, a large part of me (and I have several large parts) thinks we a losing certain bits of our humanity.
The tools we have at our disposal often dictate the things we make and how we go through life. If Wilhelm Spätula hadn't invented his eponymous tool back in 1577, we probably today wouldn't have the pancake today. Form, as the Bauhaus argued, follows function. If a fine-point pen hadn't been developed and engraving technology, then William Hogarth or Albrecht Dürer might have wound up being short-order cooks, not fine artists. You can say the same about the Ashcan amerikkkan, John Sloan who brought life to life with mere pen and ink.
My point in all this might be inchoate and complicated. But as we've neglected and maybe abandoned the thought that is generated by long-form writing, we might be neglecting and abandoning the discipline and thoughtfulness that is often implicit in that writing. We might be forgetting how to think, how to store, how to separate important from trivial, even how to share.
Maybe we no longer know about the differences between a $35,000 car and a $90,000 car because explaining those differences often takes words, and words are often, today, undervalued. When it comes to something complex, like AI, there are dozens and dozens of companies offering different AI systems, I can't recall a single one (that I didn't work on) doing a consistently decent job explaining why this one is better than that one.
Call it arrogance but I believe if, for example, kamala harris ran ads like these, consistently and persistently she would have won. Instead, we all lost. Badly. Tragically. Cataclysmically.
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Without the means of explaining how or why or what for, it seems to me that we stop valuing that knowledge and even things that are innately differentiated become genericized. Like political candidates, in extremis, because in forgetting how we eventually forget it even matters.
We lost a lot--maybe we lost the Sapiens part of Homo Sapiens--when we went from the top ad here to the bottom ad. Not only did we lose a lot as a species, our clients' businesses lost a lot, as did the entire advertising industry.
If I had to train writers today, or if anyone who is reading this cares anymore, I'd suggest they begin again to find writers they admire. Writers whose thought patterns and their ways of expressing those thoughts strike them as interesting. I'd urge anyone who wants to write to keep a list--in your head or written down--of people whose work they like and to make sure they read that person as often as they write.
One writer I like has the unlikely job of being the automotive writer for the Wall Street Journal. His name is Dan Neil and I've been reading him for about two dozen years. No one buys the Journal for auto reviews, so if that's your job, you have to find a way to do it with élan. Like Anne Wroe does over at The Economist.
The Economist is a weekly and Ms. Wroe writes their obituaries. Usually when someone dies, she's scooped by all the major news outlets. Daily papers scoop weekly papers. So, in addition to being confined by the Economist's strictures to one page of text, Wroe needs to find ways of writing her obit that others haven't already written about.
This is Mr. Neil from Saturday's Wall Street Journal. His review of a car I would never for a moment consider buying, the "entry-level" $440,000 Ferrari.
Neil says this about the coupe.
It made me laugh, underscore and remember it.
It prompted these thoughts.
That's what good writing can do.
I might also, one day, write for a client "douchiness per cubic foot." Or "drowning in their own testosterone."
I read a lot.
I especially like writing I haven't read before.
Neil's January 1996 review of the Ford Expedition described a back-seat encounter with his girlfriend.
Neil wrote this was "loving, consensual and--given the Expedition's dual airbags, side impact beams and standard four-wheel anti-lock brakes--safe sex."
These online ads for the Expedition miss the mark. Though I suppose "Cleverly designed with families in mind," comes closest.
