Addendum to the recent post in which I had a go at the awful vanity writing that pollutes so many of our precious pixels and column inches, in a style I hope will appeal to the main offenders across the country, globe and known universe: Please, newspaper reporters, please, please, please hasten your delivery to me, your faithful, time-pressed reader, of your nut graf, alternately known as “the point of your story” or “the reason this collection of words has been assembled and displayed before me.” I can literally feel the life force pouring out of my eyeballs as I read 125 words of a 500-word story before stumbling over the reason for its existence.

Lo, dear newspaper scribe! We have plowed your artful descriptions of meteorological conditions and weathered your tireless enumeration of pet species and breed, Kool-Aid flavor and serving size, pogo stick color and brand name, and hair color (”salt and pepper,” inevitably) and scrabble style (”hard,” most often), vaulted the print edition jump, and arrived, finally, at a point, a purpose, an imperative, a reason for being. My faithful informant! Now that we have expended so much energy, sweat so much burning, salty sweat and bled so much bitter, crimson blood, I pose to you this lone query as my breath wanes apace: What the heck took you so long?

Seriously, people, get to the point already.