Can you fill in the parenthesized blanks in these headlines?

(foreign city) Blast Kills (number)

(politician) Indicted In (something)-gate Scandal

(name of recently patented pill) May ALSO Cure (feared disease)

(natural disaster) Levels (big city), (number) Feared Dead

(local pro sports team) Rocks (subsidized arena name)

(big company) Stock (verb: up or down), Investors (mood)

Suspect Apprehended In (victim's last name) (crime)

Typical newswriting is very much like playing Mad-Libs, where you insert various nouns or verbs into a formula story. That's because typical commercially-driven journalism is geared to maximum efficiency and maximum advertising appeal. It's a sort of standardized product, produced quickly, consumed quickly, and focused on immediate sensation and profit, much like a hamburger, fries, and shake "combo-meal" in a fast-food restaurant.

Taking the comparison another step, I'd also say that typical journalism is probably no more healthy for our society than typical fast-food, and suffers from the same underlying problem: it's neither very tasty nor very nutritious.

For example, whenever there's a hurricane, typical news organizations pretty much just follow the same formula of reporting the pain and perseverance. If they used exactly the same reportage from a hurricane last year, and just substituted different place names for this year's unlucky disaster location, probably very few readers would notice. The same goes for reporting on political corruption, murders, new medicines, etc. It's the same old "stimulating" story, regurgitated daily.

At the WA Free Press, we don't seek to maximize efficiency or advertising. Our writers write what they want others to know, and they take as long as they want to write it. They don't tend to write about standard topics or follow formulas. Sometimes they write about matters that may be a bit uncomfortable, perhaps dealing with the underlying problems in our society or environment. Problems that we may not want to know about but which we probably need to know about.

The culinary equivalent of the WA Free Press would be home-cooked slow food, rather than chain-store fast food. Slow food is not only usually higher in nutrition, but also higher in the thought and imagination behind it. Sometimes a good slow meal might challenge your tastebuds. Sometimes you might have to get used to a flavor for a while before you like it. But you know that the cook cares about the meal, and has prepared it with genuine personal interest. That's different from a fast-food restaurant.

The WA Free Press is a lot like that. We write and edit the paper in our homes. We volunteer for this because we like to get important news out to people, news that doesn't get out in the commercially-driven media. Sometimes this news might at first seem strange or difficult to accept. But doesn't that challenge a person's thought? Isn't that much more nutritious for the mind? If you think so too, then we ask that you please subscribe to this newspaper, to help us continue to get more non-commercial news out to the public.

Doug Collins, coordinating editor