Worst lead ever, and more

• The New York Times ran a story in its Science section with the following lead:

Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination has been going on so long, babies have been born, and they’re already walking and talking.
That’s nothing. The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they’re already dead.

Now. I would imagine that your first question relates to whether this story deals with the presidential race. It does not. The story is, I *think*, about an education curriculum that blends quantitative and qualitative subject matter to engage artistic/creative-minded students in the hard sciences. I say "I think" because the story has no nut graf and is wholly unclear about its intention.

After those first two grafs it proceeds to discuss the history of science education for three looooong grafs before going into the first quote, from a biology professor.

*My* point is that I can't believe the New York Times is running stories like this. I recognize that I, too, am burying the lead -- but a) this is a ranty, rambly blog with no editing process and no expectations, and b) at least I have a lead, even if it is all the way down here.

I'm not sure if this rambling and unstructured story is a reflection of the newsroom cuts or just an isolated incident of bad writing combined with lazy editing (I'm not denigrating the reporting here -- although the writing isn't even good enough to determine whether the reporting is sufficient or not). But I think it's likely a predictor of the future of newspapers.

The one thing newspapers have always had over the Web is the vigilant editing process that keeps reporting (mostly) accurate and the writing well-structured and clear. As newsrooms slice down layers of editors and overwork reporters (although I'm sure this one is a freelancer), they're inevitably going to lose that edge.

If that happens (and one bad story in the NYT does not equal a sweeping trend), this industry is in even bigger trouble than it wants to admit.

• In other news, two pretty competitive colleges have eliminated the SAT/ACT requirement for admission. At Smith College and Wake Forest, incoming students will no longer have to take the the SAT or ACT beginning with the incoming 2009 class.

Gina V. made a good point -- that kids can avoid the SAT anyway by going to community college for just a year.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, upper-middle class kids can have their parents buy good scores with test prep classes, so it can become a measure of money rather than aptitude. But on the other hand, making the test optional means the school will weigh the test less heavily (students can still submit scores, and in most cases do at test-optional schools). That means that a low-income kid with bad grades but a high level of aptitude may not be admitted under the new rules.

Always interested to hear what you people think about this stuff...

• Why I love Jack Shafer: In his column yesterday, he goes on a rant about "unspeak," euphemistic lexicon making policy arguments impossible to argue. He concludes:

Affordable housing, like other virulent forms of unspeak, disarms its critics before they have a chance to argue. Anybody against affordable housing must be for unaffordable housing, i.e., homelessness, and hence a real shit.