Journalism: the long and the short of it

Long-form literacy is appreciated by the well-schooled and elite [Journalism: the long and the short of it]. It is lost on the illiterates of the permanent underclass. All the disasters predicted in America’s Perfect Storm of 1983 have come to pass. The most important educational document of the 90s, reissued in 2002, was ADULT LITERACY IN AMERICA out of the US Department of Education. The Educational Testing Service tested more than 13,000 people and got more than a million responses. The conclusion was that 90 million adults were functionally illiterate in prose, document or quantitative categories. Given a 50 per cent dropout rate, that number has to top 100 million. Where are the readers?

There is no writing without readers.

I worked with Mike Reilly on the AP Broadcast Desk before moving on to WINS and Reuters. He is spot-on in all his points. ■