Ah, LSJ, How I Loathe Thee

There’s been a lot of hype about how the internet is killing newspapers. Armed with two recent headlines from the Lansing State Journal, I must ask: is this actually a bad thing? I mean, think of the rigorous standards leading to the creation of these two headlines:

5-14 Inches of White Stuff Dumped on Area

“White Stuff”? So, what, cocaine is now falling from the sky? Or feathers? Or manna? Your colloquilisms are forgivable in speech, not the newspaper.

Horse Put Down After Carriage Hit By Car

This one doesn’t sound that bad. It’s concise, right? But the problem with this one is the rhetoric–this puts the HORSE’s death as the most important component of the accident–the only thing that made the event newsworthy, in fact. Which it may very well be; I think most accidents are reported as news only if there’s a death involved. But this headline puts the animal component above the human component. A horse’s life is not more important than a human’s.

So, really, newspapers, if you want to survive the digital age, stop making headlines that read like they’ve come off Twitter.