Short Little Span of Attention
Patience wears thin these days. Few take the time for anything approaching a full accounting of the news, what former Washington Post publisher Phil Graham called the first rough draft of history. He’s widely credited with being the first to describe it in those terms back in 1963, but almost certainly wasn’t.
Graham’s not alone in this regard. Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America. Henry Ford did not build the first automobile. The Wright brothers were not the first to fly an airplane. Galileo did not invent the telescope, or Thomas Edison the lightbulb, or Abner Doubleday baseball. Yet they all were credited with doing these things at one point, whether through misunderstanding, happenstance or connivance.
The inner-city schoolkids who produce the Simpson Street Free Press know better than to take even the most familiar claims at face value. They learn at an early age to scrutinize. The slogan “Never Hand in Your First Draft” appears on the masthead of every edition of their student newspaper. They learn at an early age that responsible journalism always requires clarification, revision, correction.
Speaking of slogans on newspaper mastheads, the most famous of all has to be “All the News That’s Fit to Print” on The New York Times. Some friends gave me this bound collection of what was on the newspaper’s front page on my birthday since the year I was born.
The book’s first 30 or so pages are devoted to the newspaper’s history. On page 14, I came across this photo caption:
The Times, which began as a four-page daily, printed 1,612 pages in a single issue on Sept. 14, 1987, the heaviest newspaper ever at 12 pounds.
The amount of news that was deemed fit to print that day borders on unimaginable, so much so that I did a little digging. I found an article by a Washington Post media critic listing September 14, 1987 as the date, 1,612 as the number of pages and 12 pounds as the weight, going on to quote the production chief at the Times about the record-setting size of that particular edition.
Curiously, September 14, 1987 was a Monday. Curious because the Sunday edition is always by far the largest. In case you’re wondering, yes, I did check the Guinness Book of World Records. Under “heaviest ever newspaper,” it lists The New York Times on September 13, 1987. That’s the Sunday paper. It appears this record, like all news, may be in need of clarification, revision or correction.
The date’s not the only thing that’s curious. In the Times online archives, I found this artifact where a printing plant foreman who was personally involved in assembling that day’s paper confirms all the particulars of the edition and adds that the 12-pounder had an astonishing 2,030,000 lines of type. Blew my mind.
In 1987, the Times had a six-column format as it does now, with each line of type typically containing five to seven words, give or take. If that day’s newspaper truly included over 2 million lines of type, that would put the total number of words somewhere north of 10 million. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is roughly 587,000 words long.
Regardless of who got the facts exactly right and who got them somewhat wrong, an indisputable truth remains in the annals of history. The news of the day used to be reported in extraordinary detail. Contrast that with the 140-character format of bulletins—dubbed “tweets”—that made a present-day social media platform one of the world’s most popular.
Whether it was the 13th or 14th day of 1987, all the news that was fit to print on that single day would take a lifetime to tweet out. If that printing plant foreman can be taken at his word, you could send a tweet once every hour, around the clock, seven days a week, for close to three-quarters of a century and still not share as much information as was packed into The New York Times on one day not quite 38 years ago.
Not even the Times comes remotely close to reporting the news so comprehensively anymore, which says a whole lot about how much news gathering and consumption have changed and a whole lot more about the span of our attention nowadays.