The day may come when newspapers are filled only with headlines, photographs and captions, but that day is surely light years closer to a very distant horizon than it is to the here and now.

The advances in modern technology have spawned an impatient society, so much so that anything but instant gratification is seen as real failure.

We do not want to wait patiently for internet access on a slow day for the world wide web; we expect same-day service for anything from dry cleaning to picture framing; we dread the idea of standing at the back of a queue that contains more than two people; we constantly speed and drive recklessly on our roads every morning to get to a destination that is only ever five minutes away at a crawl; we moan ad nauseam about the pace of service at hospital emergency rooms.

’Twas ever thus.

With this level of intolerance, it is no wonder that many cannot be bothered to read beyond a headline and caption while scanning over a photograph.

Which is fine. But do us a favour: don’t then claim to be well read or to know, pontificate about and “share” the story without ever having entered, let alone survived, the introductory paragraph.

Reporters here and all over the world work tirelessly at their craft. They are put under tremendous pressure by their superiors to produce, and produce they do — day after day after day. Most times for an ungrateful and ungracious public, with shows of thanks so few and far between so as to stun the recipient into a bashful retreat.

Sometimes gathering the news is easy, such as two crooks robbing a Front Street store at high noon (how is that helmet visor legislation that we heard about in the 2015 Throne Speech going, by the way?). But on other occasions, a bit of enterprise is required.

In any case, the lot of a reporter is a thankless one because they are often damned if they do and damned if they don’t — they should not take it too much to heart because it is the price of entry when you sign on to become a journalist.

But what is totally out of order is when among those who do the damning, a good many have not read a single word apart from the “furniture” or “window dressing”, yet want to stop all traffic so that their views may be heard on a story of interest.

“Did you see ... ?”, “I saw in the paper that ...”, “She did ...; yes, it was in the paper ...” And then, when all else fails: “Same old RG ...”

At the outset of a journalist’s career, they are taught the basics of writing a story. These include knowing the Five Ws and One H: who, what, when, where, why and how. Without all six, it is not always possible to present a balanced account. Equally impossible is to do so through the use of the headline, photograph and caption alone.

Writers are also schooled to presume that the reader has a short attention span.

Therefore, as much as possible of the must-have information should appear in the front end of an article. This approach has worked throughout the ages; from the very beginnings when newspapers were produced off stone to this era of digital printing.

Readers attuned to helping themselves to snippets would have embraced the introduction of smartphones and tablets, which suit ideally the mobile nature of the millennial.

This is not to say that reading a 500-word story from start to finish has become out-of-fashion. To do so would signal the death knell for the big interview and some of the finer pieces of journalism. And that would be a tragedy.

The tragedy now is that the informed are being overrun by the uninformed, who soon become ill-informed owing to the false narratives spun by the worst excesses of the skim reader.

It calls to mind the cruel idiom “those who can’t do, teach”. Make that, for a deal more accuracy, “those who can’t read, preach”.

A newspaper with only headlines, photographs and captions?

Right. What a gruesome thought.