Turning Japanese

In an otherwise unobjectionable article about the decline of a business providing English-to-Japanese translations in last Saturday's Washington Post, we find this paragraph:

One morning last week, Karol Zipple, the company's only American employee, made a small pile of clips: news stories on increased Japanese demand for American wine, food-borne illnesses and the women's golf tour. Compared with coverage in previous years, it was a depressingly slim product. "We used to be buried in newsprint" before U.S. newspapers began cutting back coverage as a result of the recession and the decline of print journalism, Zipple said.

I did a double-take when I read that first sentence. Why, I wondered, was there "increased Japanese demand for ... food-borne illnesses and the women's golf tour"?

Then I realized that this was a series of separate items defined by "news stories on" rather than "increased Japanese demand for."

The ambiguity could have been avoided by rearranging the objects, like this: "news stories on food-borne illnesses, the women's golf tour, and increased Japanese demand for American wine."

Simple, isn't it?

This might also be a good time to urge the Washington Post to reinstate the serial comma in its style book. It never should have been removed in the first place.