How To Read The Paper

It is increasingly difficult to read the paper, not because of what is in it but because of what isn't. Back in the day, when newsprint was ink on paper and journalism had some integrity, a basic tenet of competent reporting was to answer the four key questions in the first sentence: who, what, when and where. This slowly eroded to the "get these in the first paragraph" and as that slippery slope got steeper it is uncommon to find these questions answered anywhere in the entire article.

So here is an effective and efficient way to gather information from a "news" paper: read the first paragraph of an article and if all four questions are not answered move to the next article. With this approach you get all the information available in the paper in under thirty minutes of which twenty nine are spent in the sports section covering the last remaining meritocracy in America.