FILE PHOTO: Vasciannie Stephen Vasciannie, Colummnist
ROUND ONE: Your column must have punch. It must be strongly argued. You must take on the politicians. You must shake up the bureaucracy. When wrongdoers read you, they must shake in their boots. You must be contrarian, and you must never be doubtful. If you take the route of "on the one hand" and "on the other", you will lose your readers. They want certainties, simplicities, hammer, hammer, nail.
IN CONTRAST: Your column must be subtle. You should slip in your criticisms with a deft touch. You must not protest too much. Avoid hammering away all day long as this will bore your readers. Don't adopt a contrarian view just for the sake of it. Sometimes politicians get things right: acknowledge this with the criticisms you offer. Move beyond the hackneyed practice of simply attacking people because they are in public life. Show intellectual sophistication by addressing a wide variety of issues. Combine your specialist knowledge with a more general appreciation of society and social issues.
LENGTH
ROUND TWO: Length is not quality. Keep your column below 1,000 words. No! Keep it below 800. Actually, 750 is a better word limit. You know, people have neither the time nor the inclination to read more than 700 words. If you stray past the word limit, you might get chopped. Use long quotations from highfalutin, fancy foreign journals to show that you are well-read. Tell people you are well-read. Make sure that you throw in vogue words such as orthodoxy, epistemology, paradigm, praxis and heuristic in your columns. You should educate your readers.
IN CONTRAST: Length is not quality. Some ideas, though, need to be developed, and readers like a coherent assessment of issues. The best newspapers of the inner and outer empires assume that readers can easily absorb ideas expressed in 1,000 words. Columnists instinctively write towards the word limit that was allowed when they first started writing. Why don't we just have 100-word columns, to satisfy those who are assumed to have no attention span? Or 50-word contributions? Avoid lengthy quotations, for you are cheating the newspaper by relying heavily on others. Use your own words, and read, always read.
ROUND THREE:< The market is king. Write for King Market. This means that you must always figure out what people want to read, and then give it to them. Avoid esoteric things. People like to read about familiar things. They like to know that their thoughts find themselves reflected in the columns of a big time paper. They want to be flattered by columnists, and most of all, they have a weakness for shortness. Radicalism helps. Your column should shout, "Read this, please, please!"
IN CONTRAST:Integrity is king. Write what you believe to be true. Of course, you must keep your readers in mind, but this should not mean that you must write to suit majority taste or sentiment. People do not always want to read about familiar things. They like to be challenged, they want to be taken to areas or patterns of thought they had not anticipated. They most certainly do not want columnists trying to write down to them, nor do they appreciate the idea that they have the attention span of a gnat. Pre-cooked philosophies lead to stale predictability.
THE STABLE
And so the debate goes on. It must be very difficult for the editor of a great newspaper to set objectives and approaches for his or her columnists. Perhaps for this reason, editors tend to give a considerable degree of independence to the horses in their stables. If, for instance, you read the London Times, you will not come away with the feeling that the editor has sought to influence his writers. If anything, you may leave with the view that he has said, "All right, make sure your submission is timely; I want to put you on page 7. Good luck." The editor assumes that by recruiting a variety of writers with different styles, different parts of the market will be satisfied, and that no one writer is likely to captivate consistently most of the readers.
Similarly, the editor of the New York Times probably says very little to his columnists. Rather, he recruits writers on the basis of his knowledge of them and leave them to get on with the job. If, as appears to be the case, this results in a very liberal editorial spread, we may assume that at some stage the editor decided that this was his preference, or that of the publisher. This must be the right approach.
Stephen Vasciannie is a professor at the University of the West Indies and a consultant in the Attorney-General's chambers.
