Some folks like green beans; some adore broccoli. Some like beef and some prefer the other white meat, pork.
There is no accounting for individual taste.
But one thing that editors of general circulation publications learn is the line between good taste and bad, the thin line over which humor or irony or conflict can flop right into poor taste.
As children, we learn this when our parents and teachers turn purple from choking over something we said or wrote and then the authority figures put us into timeout for the next year or so.
Newspaper editors generally learn the location of the good taste/bad taste line by stepping over it once. Those phone calls, those letters to the editor actually make an impression on editors whose jobs are to pick and choose among story ideas and story execution for the next day’s edition.
Succinctly, there is a reason why adult magazines come in plain brown wrappers and daily newspapers do not.
One area of this newspaper that brings me more complaints than any other is Salt Substitute, a feature section that appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesdays.
Most of the reader comments come in the “What the hell were you people thinking?” form. They complain that articles in the section are “in poor taste,” “not appropriate for my children to read,” and “childish.”
I thought perhaps the reader complaints were peculiar to Utah and reflective of its generally conservative culture. I checked with reader advocates and ombudspeople at other newspapers. The answers they gave to my questions were interesting.
“At the Detroit Free Press, we run nothing like what you mention. We encourage children, parents and teachers to read the newspaper … so anything of questionable taste is highly scrutinized,” wrote John X. Miller, public editor. They go after the age 20-45 male/female market with “a video games columnist and a full page of games reviews in the Sunday newspaper, and a weekend section with lots of lists, bands and restaurants.”
At the Chicago Tribune, according to Don
Wycliff, theirits ombudsman, The Chicago Tribune has a Sunday section called Q (for qualities of life). It strikes me as a grab-bag of hip, trendy, sometimes smart ass, sometimes just smart stories, features, etc. My impression is that it has not boosted circulation among the demographic (25-40 or thereabouts) that it was intended to reach. … If anything it suffers from a sense among readers that it has no clear identity. Nobody knows what to expect from it.
We have some taste rules, but they are fairly elastic. Our readers … express enormous chagrin and disappointment when we depart from expectations.
The Boston Globe strives to be “edgy” (favorite new word here) and take risks (favorite concept). The written rules about taste are a bit vague sometimes defined simply as what offends a particular editor on a given day but there is a general understanding that vulgarity and things of an overtly sexual nature don’t belong in the paper,” according to Christine S. Chinlund, the newspaper’s ombudsman.
So, in an age when the average age of newspaper readers continues to climb, even major newspapers understand that being offensive is not going to draw new readers. Some of the best stories that appear in “Salt Substitute” could appear in other Tribune feature sections; some of the worst do not belong in a daily, general circulation newspaper.w=8.4
The biggest problem with this section edited by the talented Michael Yount and written by many talented Salt Lake Tribune writers is that it often fails in its attempts to be edgy and becomes offensive.
Edginess is not what will draw younger subscribers. Many of these younger people never developed the habit of reading a daily newspaper; some of them believe they get all the news they need from Internet Web sites. The industry as a whole needs to figure out a way including Newspapers in Education to develop new generations of newspaper readers.
The reality is this: In an era of small newsholes and a reader demand for hard news on the world, and national and state/local level, Tribune editors say that Salt Substitute will be ending its run soon.
The Reader Advocate’s phone number is 801-257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. reader.advocate@sltrib.com
Scoreboard:
Number of readers who want serious world and national news on the front page 15
Number of readers who claim The Tribune is snotty about Utah culture 19
Number of readers suspicious about the sanity of the person who edits “Salt Substitute” 21
Number of readers who are throwing away the newspaper’s weekly TV supplement 16
