Scratching his nuts

Posted by: spacecog

Scratching his nuts
Michael "The Convolutenator" Miner is such a terrible journalist it’s hard to know even where to begin in cataloguing his various flaws. But I suspect a lot of them stem from the little problem of his missing nuts.

Well, not nuts, per se. Nut grafs. The term is a bit of journalistic jargon for the paragraph, or sentence, or whatever, that tells readers, in a nutshell, where the story is going and why they should care.

Alas, the question of why the reader should care is not one that Miner seems very interested in asking, much less answering. Try to find a nut graf in his latest column. There isn’t one. There never is. That’s one of the reasons that reading a typical column of his feels so much like falling into a vat of taffy. (Bad tasting taffy, I hasten to add.) Miner is a journalism critic who doesn’t understand how to practice good journalism himself.

Take his column this week. The column starts with what Miner intends to be a sort of comedy routine, essentially a 500-word warmup, in what Miner apparently believes is humorous prose, to his awarding Sun-Times sports columnist Toni Ginetti a little award the Reader has made up called the BAT (or Baseball Acumen Test). (Apparently she’s great at predicting.) The whole thing is written with a sort of mock pompousness that manages to be about ten times as irritating as real pompousness. But nowhere a nut graf.

Same thing with his second item, which is about a couple of Pioneer Press columnists he thinks were wrongly sacked, but he only gets to them after several hundred words – I almost wrote "pages" – of duller-then-dirt prose.

Surely Miner knows what a nut graf is. So either he’s simply incapable or writing them or he thinks he’s somehow above them, that he’s such a masterful prose stylist that he can simply dispense with journalistic convention and just, you know, fly free. Alas, like Monty Python's famous flying sheep, Miner's prose does not so much fly as plummet.