In which one gifted journalist sizes up a giant

Mike Lien/The New York Times, 1971

The effect on the business was profound, as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar.

— One of many, many wonderful sentences in David Carr’s remembrance of Ben Bradlee

The whole column is worth reading and probably worth memorizing, but if you’re in TL;DR mode at least read the full paragraph in which that sentence arrives:

So in 1969, [Bradlee] conjured Style, a hip, cheeky section of the newspaper that reflected the tumult of the times in a city where fashion and discourse were rived with a maddening sameness. The effect on the business was profound, as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar. He expanded the vernacular of newspapering, enabling real, actual writers to shed the shackles of convention and generate daily discourse that made people laugh, spill their coffee or throw The Post down in disgust.