Bloomberg Not Shy About Buts

In catching up on some James Surowiecki, I came across this most bizarre example of trying to please the customer. Referring to a Vanity Fair piece on Bloomberg News, Surowiecki writes:

Bloomberg banned the word "but" from its stories because it required readers "to deal with conflicting ideas in the same sentence." It's a little hard to tell from the context whether this rule is still in effect or not, but (there I go again) I can guarantee I will now be looking for "but"s or "however"s in every Bloomberg story I read.

Let's help out here: A Factiva search reveals that the ban is no longer in existence. In fact, Bloomberg News likes using 'buts' about as much as any of its newswire competitors. (The word appeared in 839 out 2,252 stories published on Bloomberg.com over the past month, or 37 percent of all stories) This chart shows the frequency of 'buts' among the major newswires:

But the 40-ish percent range can't really be called a natural rate of 'but'-use. The following chart shows the percentage of all articles using the conjunction for the average newswire and the average big newspaper (I used WSJ, NYT, and WaPo):

I think the gap between wires and papers actually makes sense since they different purposes.

Newswire copy is meant to be easily digested and is typically "just about the facts." Meanwhile newspapers have to add value through analysis -- even more so over the past couple of decades with the rise of 24-hour TV news and the web. That latter notion would mean that the 'but'-usage divide between wires and papers would have been smaller 20 or so years ago. And this seems to be supported by the data. In 1988, the average newswire had 'but' in 37 percent of its articles, while the average paper had it in 60 percent.

The following chart shows the evolution of newspaper 'but' use since 1984: