Features

It’s fashionable to mock Youtube Shorts and Tiktok as catering to modern short attention spans.

True except for modern. Entertainment has always provided brief moments and quick distractions for people who can’t devote several hours of intense concentration to a novel or an opera or a Gone With The Wind.

Lately I’ve been talking about short features in radio, newspapers, and newsreels. Ansel Kellogg’s Patent Insides did a good business supplying short features to country papers who couldn’t afford their own researchers and writers.

Kirn’s attempted “old” newspaper fails because it misses this point. Supposedly countering the “modern” short span, it loses the value of a newspaper. It has no features in either sense. No short pieces to give you a moment of humor or empathy, and no visual variety in the columns and fonts. I suppose it succeeds as a lit’ry journal for a small closed circle of lit’ry fans. That’s certainly a valid type of periodical, but it isn’t a newspaper and it isn’t entertainment.