A funny thing happened to me when I did my regular chore at the Newsline for the Blind this morning. The reading was easy.
Let me explain. We volunteers read the daily paper into a computer, so New Mexicans who are blind can phone in and hear the news.
Generally I make a lot of mistakes when I read. (Happily, the system permits me to go back and correct them.) Today, though, I rarely stumbled. And today I was reading the USA Today Weekend insert for the first time.
Later, in conversation with Mike Santullo, boss of the Newsline, I realized that the insert is better written. "Better" means, first, that it lacks the daily paper's traditional impediments. Those attributions at the end of a sentence, for example. And the difficult words used because the writer doesn't work at finding simpler equivalents.
Putting it another way, USA Today Weekend is written and re-written with the reader in mind. You sure can't say that about most daily newspapers.
This is not to say that it's always worth reading; Lord save us from these dopey celebrity profiles. But today's issue did contain an interesting story suggesting that young people do, in fact, read newspapers.
I wonder how many more kids would pick up papers if they were readable.