why i am no longer writing about substack on substack
apart from this post, obviously
1Back in my 20s, when I was staff columnist on a Canadian broadsheet, one of the unwritten, much-spoken rules was that ‘no one likes a process piece.’ A process piece, in case you’re not au fait with antique journalistic lingo, is a story that includes details about the reporting, editing and/or legal process behind the story itself — the inside-inside scoop.
The serious senior newsmen at the very sombre right-leaning national paper I worked all agreed that process pieces were self-indulgent, boring. Not to us obviously — journalists are obsessed with ourselves, the masthead resembled a Woodward and Bernstein impersonator troupe — but to “real people” (a.k.a. readers) who wanted just the plain, unadorned facts, nothing more.
How wrong they were.