[journospeak] just the facts, ma’am

In the article on the new Congress, I put in some stats near the end but I’d like to write a little now about getting those stats. What it involved was a useless and wasteful exercise. Here’s the chronology:

1] Journo reads the list of stats from the Capitol.
2] To make a good article, he chops the list around, leaving some entries out, highlighting others, stating and restating so that the whole comes out as a ‘readable’ journalistic article.
3] Blogger reads the MSM article and decides to post. So he has to reconstruct the list, piece by piece, to where it was before the journo took it apart and then has to surf to find the last little links the journo deemed not worthy of inclusion.
4] The blogger then posts.

How many of us have time for this rubbish? Why couldn’t the journo have simply posted the list as it was, leaving us to draw our own conclusions and then, for those who wanted, there would be an annotated comment for each entry? When there are lists and stats, we don’t want some beautiful journo piece getting in the way. We want ‘just the facts, ma’am’.

A perfect example of this wastage was the work behind this post.