Quote:
Originally Posted by Kjesse
Has Francis always been a sentence-is-a-paragraph guy like Rick Bell? Reading that format makes it seem like he's pining to take over Bell's place. Can one actually aspire to that?
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The
Sun has been edited that way from the beginning. If William Faulkner wrote an article for the
Sun, with a sentence 300 words long, the editors would chop it into 30 separate paragraphs and make him read exactly like Bell or Francis.
There is a considerable amount of classism in the newspaper business. Tabloids were traditionally the papers of the working class, whereas professional people were expected to show their status by knowing the correct way to fold a broadsheet for reading on the train. Tabloid editors assumed their readers were illiterate. Broadsheet editors assumed their readers were literate but gullible. (You don't see this happening in the U.K., by the way, where even staid and stodgy bourgeois papers like the
Times are published in tabloid format.)
You see the same attitude persisting, ridiculously, even today when it means nothing. I don't go long on CP without seeing somebody sneer at ‘Sun readers’, even though the
Sun and
Herald share the same publisher, newsroom, and reporters. And when someone wants to snark about Ken King, the go-to insult is that he was publisher of the
Sun; never mind that he was publisher of the
Herald later on.
It's amusingly foolish. I wish I could say it was endearing, but it's not.