Style gettting in the way of clear reporting

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 10:28 PM 7/7/96, Raph Levien wrote:
>Declan McCullagh wrote:
>>
>> "We are writers, not crytographers."
>>
>> -Declan
>
>   Well done. Very well done. I'm not sure why Brock is constructing
>this hard-drinking bad-boy persona (perhaps he's trying to become the
>Trent Reznor of crypto journalism), but the piece was great.

I found it unreadable. No doubt some fine reporting, but the "faux
Chandler" touches made it unreadable for me.

"The last gin joint in cyberspace, and I had to to be the one to break it
the babe, a thirty-two bit floozy with gams as long as, well, let's just
say they made me forget about the Feds waiting to send me up the river for
the long one..."

With no _personal_ criticism of either Brock or Declan, I find that most
modern cyberspace journalism--much more so than the mainstream press--is
this kind of "performance piece" stuff, where pastiches of Chandler, Hunter
S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and all the like are lathered all over the
articles.

The clearest and most extreme examples of this trend are the columns by
Spencer S. Katt, Robert X. Cringely, and the other rumor-mongers of the
trade weeklies, where a few morsels of actual reporting are buried in vast
amounts of phony stuff. Such as endless crap about "Pammy," a dingbat--and
utterly fictional--Valley Girl who one of these columnists uses to pads his
columns with. This New Journalism kind of stuff is also rampant in "Wired."
I suppose some people like it. I call them easily impressed. Or as Raymond
S. might put it, "She was the kind of dame impressed by a paint by numbers
Mona Lisa."

Sadly, simple expository prose must be considered to be too boring, too banal.

(Actually, were only a few writers doing this, it might be mildy tolerable.
Speaking for myself, that is. But so _many_ "cyberspace journalists" are
doing bad pastiches of famous stylists that the reportage is being lost in
the noise.

"A screaming comes across the screen."

Wake up, Brock and Declan! And all the other too clever by half New
Journalists. I'd like to read some of your stuff, not hit the delete key as
soon as see the style-laden ersatz Chandler larding up the article.

--Tim May




Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."