"Cook me up 300 words on internet dating."

With the plethora of stories about online affairs that readers seem never to tire of, I often imagine a newspaper newsroom taking care of business before the deadline for going to print. The editor suddenly realizes that he's got two empty columns of print space that are still unaccounted for, and the wire services don't seem to have anything of particular interest that can fill up the spot. It's at times such as these that I picture him calling up his feature editor and telling him:

Hey, we've got some room here. Maybe you've got a story about a dwarf who registered with an onling dating service and told all sort of interesting things about himself except that one little fact?

My guess is that this is the sort of story that can be created via a journalistic version of painting by numbers, though of course that shouldn't necessarily be understood as criticism.

Go to: Mother Night on the web.