Starting now, these columns will not be over 550 words long. It is a self-imposed limit to conform with the shrinking attention span that most of us seem to be experiencing.
That condition was caused in part by social media. Facebook and things like that have countless messages that keep coming at you as long as you continue scrolling.
But most of them are in short bursts with not many words. Some messages are just symbols that show a smile, frown, thumbs-up, heart or some such thing. Somebody named them emojis.
The Twitter people imposed a limit of 140 characters for their messages at the beginning but changed to 280 characters a few years ago. That translates to about 50 words.
So folks like me who were writing back before people got too busy to leisurely peruse newspapers and other outlets must embrace this demand for brevity.
I hope old dogs can learn new tricks. If I had an emoji of an old dog, I would put it in here. The new trick I will be trying to learn is cutting a couple of hundred words out of these columns.
That will be a drastic change for an old school journalism guy. When I started writing for newspapers in high school, the more you wrote, the more you got paid.
Mrs. Garrison, the editor of the Springhill Press, paid me a dime an inch to write sports. She would take one of the spools of string used to tie bundles of newspapers, measure my stories and then measure the string with a yardstick. That’s the origin of stringers.
She said she needed at least 100 inches a week to fill space in the paper, and I needed that $10 for hamburgers and milkshakes. If I wrote just 99 and a half inches, my check was $9.95.
Mrs. Garrison was tough and didn’t just throw money around. All the editors I have worked for since then were creampuffs by comparison. She wanted volume, and that ideology stuck with me.
My college journalism professor John Merrill had worked at a big newspaper, and he demanded thorough, in-depth stories. Most of his red marks on our papers called for more details.
We got a little scholarship money to work for the college paper. Most weeks before it went to press, we stayed up all night churning out enough stuff to fill those gaping pages.
Even on my first real job at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans where we had a building full of writers, space in the paper was hard to fill at times. The night editor would look at our long stories and say, “Add some more quotes.”
One of my favorite southern writers is Rick Bragg. He won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Many of his stories were lengthy. His inside-the-back-cover pieces in Southern Living now are more compact but still captivating.
Most journalists agree that it’s more challenging to be brief and concise than to write expansive, flowery prose with sweeping, far-reaching particulars.
This 550-word limit will create some restrictions on storytelling, embellishments, flavor and color that I have always enjoyed in writing and reading, but it will be better for folks in a hurry.
Don’t waste time counting. This is 544 words.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES