Want Filigree With Those Facts?

The Associated Press, the chief wire service news source for American newspapers and broadcasters, has decided to distribute two versions of major breaking news stories: one a traditional, straightforward, factual news lead and the other a more evocative, literary version using images, vivid description, quotes and narrative techniques intended to engage busy readers.

ALT LEDE: On a sunny, wind-swept late winter day underscoring the diverse weather systems spanning a nation as large as the United States, the good old Associated Press, a vast publishing consortium that has fed Americans their news for 156 years, is enhancing the story diet it feeds newspapers challenged by instant broadcast and Internet competition.

To promote better cardio-financial health in the newspapers’ circulation systems, the venerable wire service will now squeeze two versions of every big story from its hard-pressed staff:

One, a familiar nuts-and-bolts tale that most readers will have digested several times long before the newspaper’s delivery, and the other a more flowing, even quirky, version that’s more fun to chew on and could bring useful perspective absent from the cable TV crawl.

What if this version A and version B were applied retrospectively? Very retrospectively.

A: Two Army captains no one ever heard of have completed the first official visit to vast North American lands recently purchased from France by former colonies calling themselves the United States.

Or B: After a two-year trek across vast plains, tempestuous rivers and hostile mountains in places yet to be named Montana, Idaho and the Dakotas, Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reported to a pigtailed President Jefferson today that the $15-million Louisiana Purchase was a lot larger than it looks on maps.

A: President Lincoln was scheduled to attend the theater this evening.

Or B: After another arduous day holding a fractious nation together over the issues of slavery and secession and impatient with the slow fingers of telegraphers transmitting last week’s battlefield reports, a lanky President Lincoln leaned back at his government-issue desk and told aides, “Get my tallest hat. I feel like a play tonight.”

A: President Harry Truman today ordered the bombing of a Japanese city with a very powerful explosive device that scientists said had the potential to end World War II.

Or B: Leaning back in his chair at the historic Lincoln desk, a onetime Missouri haberdasher who only recently inherited the U.S. presidency today approved dropping something called an atom bomb on an undisclosed Japanese place.

“The war must end soon,” he said.