Washington Post: Small News from Portland
20th August 2020
One of the more striking phenomena of recent years is the trend toward making certain news articles duller, vaguer, and more insignificant sounding. Stories used to be written to begin with the five W’s — Who, What, Where, When, and Why — as close to the top as human verbal ingenuity could manage. But lately, many stories are constructed to bore the casual reader into moving on to the next story before he has much of a clue what this one is about.