Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How

Yesterday, a beautiful Sunday morning, I open the gate and stepped out of the yard with Chandler in tow. There, twenty five feet away from the gate, closer to the sewer than the house, was the Sunday paper. At least the paper boy got it in the right vicinity. Of course the paper 'boy' is actually a man in a beat up, twenty year old Ford, who delivers the paper by flinging it out the window as he speeds by. Newspaper delivery is nothing like the service I provided when I was an actual paper boy. When I delivered the newspaper, all papers were placed on the front porch or between the doors if so requested. The paper was never, ever thrown onto the porch. When I stooped down to pick up the newspaper yesterday morning I noticed how light it was. Not at all like what I used to deliver. Back then the Sunday paper weighed at least five pounds and required an entire forest be chopped into pulp for just one week's run.

            We don't get the newspaper during the week anymore, only on Sunday. Weekday papers are useless. There isn't much news in it, and not even enough paper to line a bird cage. Weekday papers are more like news pamphlets. Like many people I get most of my news from the internet. Every morning after walking the dogs, I fire up the computer and check the news. First thing, you have to get past the sensational stories, and the Malaysian Airplane story if you're on the CNN news site. Then you have to make sense out of the piss poor writing skills of the correspondents. Internet news is not nearly as well written as news stories were when I was a kid. Who, what, where, when, why, and how. That is what I learned in my eighth grade creative writing class. In the very first paragraph of a news story you should know who is involved, what happened, where it happened, when it happened, why it happened, and how it happened. On most internet news sites you're lucky if they even know where the country is that they're writing about. If the name Kardashian or Lohan isn't involved, it isn't news to them. It's no wonder Americans are such misinformed people, even without watching Fox News.