On Joseph Mitchell and the "grammar of hard facts."

The book is Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel, and in honesty, my attention was snagged by the very phrase "grammar of hard facts."

As tactile newspapers continue their decline (or evolution, as some would suggest), will this old-school reportorial stereotype become even more entrenched in mythology -- or will we be too busy with user-generated ephemera to care?

Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker: The grammar of hard facts (The Economist)

... Researching a story, Mitchell could spend whole days on the bus, taking notes on what he saw out of the window, or wandering around a cemetery to identify the weeds that grew there. Mitchell, wrote one critic, could “achieve the same effects with the grammar of hard facts that Dickens achieved with the rhetoric of imagination.” He came to be widely imitated. Calvin Trillin dedicated one of his books “to the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—Joseph Mitchell.”