>Is the split between the editorial pages and the rest of the Wall Street
>journal coming to an end? A couple of days ago, the front page once again
>raised the issue that trees might be a cause of pollution.
Not to defend mainstream journalistic practice too much, but there is a spectrum there. Not very wide, for sure, but reporters have their biases and try to work them into stories. That tree story was, in Journal parlance, an A-hed - the whimsical story at the center of the front page, so called because the rules around the headline look sort of like an A. So an A-hed on tree pollution could be read as, "Ha ha, that old loon Ronnie was right after all, ha ha." Ha ha.
Another bit of Journalese - in the "leaders," the stories in the first and last columns on the front page - all have a "nut graf," the paragraph that's supposed to distill the moral of the story. If you put your pinkie on the byline and spread your fingers, your thumb should just about hit the nut graf. Individual experience may vary, depending on story and hand, but that's the formula.
Doug