19 ms·
When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pelasaco 6y agoI would say that the answer is something like "who cares as long the SEO check pass and it s being well monetized?"
- _red 6y agoIf we assume that newspapers goal is to sell papers to the maximum number of potential readers, this indicates a decline in general literacy / IQ of reading populace. Compare and contrast the average newspaper article written in say 1921 compared to now. The difference in comprehension level is pretty glaring.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jonahx 6y ago> If we assume that newspapers goal is to sell papers to the maximum number of potential readers, this indicates a decline in general literacy / IQ of reading populace. No doubt audiences are less well read today, but in theory this should motivate simpler, clearer writing, rather than the opaque, convoluted writing the article is (rightly) criticizing.
- wegs 6y agoPerhaps not. 1) "Potential readers" is limited to people who can afford newspapers. NY Times runs around $520 per year in paper, at 2020 printing and delivery costs, and around $100 digitally. Printing and delivery costs, as portion of GDP-per-capita, were much higher in 1921. In 1921, the audience was extremely exclusive. An online audience is more democratic, and ergo, less educated. 2) Newspapers aren't driven by selling papers, so much as by organizational dynamics. I need to satisfy my boss and my peers to keep my job. Sales is one aspect of that, and as organizations grow in size, a decreasing aspect. As far as I can tell, NY Times has hired a bunch of idiots, and a lot of the most competent reporters are heading fast for the door. Many companies which go under do so because of bad culture, often resulting from wildly misaligned incentives, good people leaving, bad people failing to bring in new good people, and so on. I think NY Times is slowly heading that way. I've seen few organizations able to claw back from where it is. Facebook and Google are moving in that direction too, for that matter.
- Voxoff 6y agoReally? Isn't it more likely that the fincancial motive translates to quicker, scrappier & less polished articles.
- rsynnott 6y agoThe average person in 1921 certainly was not reading the New York Times, if they were reading anything (which is doubtful). In any case, the complaint being made (which I'm not sure that I buy) is that it's _more_ poorly written (and thus hard to read) today, not _less_.
- michaelhoffman 6y agoNewspapers have been laying off copy editors right and left in recent years. A reduction in the quality and clarity of writing is an obvious and predictable outcome. https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-other-newsroom-staffers-but-can-newspapers-credibility-afford-the-cut/ https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-... https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantling-its-copy-desk-the-new-york-times-is-making-a-mistake-thats-been-made-before/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...
- AlexandrB 6y agoIt's sad to think that the lousy state of journalism in the 90s and early 2000s might have actually been a golden age.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoNot only newspapers but even publishers of books. As a translator occasionally hired to translate works of literature, I do the best I can, but my manuscript still needs to go before a good proofreader and copyeditor to make everything just perfect before it is published. I have been dismayed at how now, publishers no longer use in-house staff but just hire an incompetent or lazy copywriter from the developing world off some freelancing platform. The same holds for typesetting. Sometimes the end result is worse than my original manuscript! Sadly, publishers 1) are competing with e.g. books self-published on Amazon, and 2) noticed that the mass market consuming those Amazon self-published efforts seems pretty OK with content that is full of typos and bad-quality typesetting, so why even bother any more?
- Zelphyr 6y agoA medical provider I know had a medical assistant that would write charts that were next to illegible. Little to no punctuation or capitalization. Slang. etc... The provider invariably had to go back and rewrite the charts because they didn't want that associated with their name. It's no wonder more and more people don't care about virtually unedited published content. In addition to not caring, often times they don't even know the difference. Which begs the question for me: what is it they say we're getting with all these standardized tests and the singular focus on teaching kids to pass those tests again? Because it seems to me we're about to have a populace doesn't read and can't write.
- vikbytes 6y agoI found this an interesting article at first glance but after comparing the two analyses he posted, are the numbers really that different that you can make a big distinction in terms of the articles differing readability? (If we accept that the program does a good job analyzing the text.) Would be very interesting to see this kind of analysis with a decent sample size and see if there actually is a trend. Hard to tell by comparing just two articles.
- TwoBit 6y agoI don't know about those two scores, but the second paragraph was definitely simpler written.
- zozin 6y ago"Journalism" isn't a real profession anymore. It doesn't attract writing talent, except at the margins. Why should it, journalism jobs have decreased by more than ~50% the last decade. Journalists are now just copywriters; optimizing for SEO and Google's spiders.
- reedjosh 6y agoAgreed. Go here instead: https://substack.com/ https://substack.com/ That or any other non-ad funded media source.
- mrweasel 6y agoJournalism is expensive, so what I think may be happening is that the newspapers are no longer able to afford to fill an entire paper with the writings of actual journalists. Instead they hire "writers" and "translators" who take junk from the internet and notices from news agencies and turn it into sort of articles. Danish newspapers are filled with bad spelling and broken language. It's pretty clear that they're hiring people to translate or piece together articles. The real investigating articles are still well written, but there aren't enough of those to fill the paper or update the website multiple times a day.
- cratermoon 6y agoNewspapers used to be great for local news. But now with layoffs they barely cover the usual local beats. They fill lots of space with "local" news that is actually written off in some corporate center by a few people that do a few minutes of googling. https://newrepublic.com/article/160534/desperate-last-days-local-news https://newrepublic.com/article/160534/desperate-last-days-l...
- mrweasel 6y agoYou can’t actually get local news anymore. There was a fire at a nursing home just a few km from my house. Only “reporting” available the next day was via a Facebook group for the local area. The papers that are small enough to cover it no longer exists and it not worth covering in the larger papers.
- bbu 6y agoWhen the money from ads and classifieds moved to the web...
- mancerayder 6y agoI definitely noticed the convoluted, obfuscated writing style of the NYT and New Yorker. The sentences are longer than they need to be, combining multiple independent pieces of data and stringing them together with commas. Something like this: Like the style of Adorno and Habermas, two Critical Theorists popular in the literary criticism field, we like to weave together different trains of thought, since this helps drive a narrative that the reader can relate to, and the New Yorker and the NY Times (since arguably they hire their writers with a recent academic background in a journalistic or literary discipline, often swimming in this style of writing, which dates from a particular elitist conception of writing you might find in Dialectic of Enlightenment or Adorno's works of cultural critique) like to make the reader work for it, since this perhaps contributes to the high literary feel of the paper.
- LanceH 6y agoIt seems in the past 15 years there is a deliberate avoidance of the actual topic until deep into the article. I can only assume this hits some optimization for online use.
- mancerayder 6y agoI think it's an elitism in the writing style. If you can write densely, it signals education.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoWord quotas; gotta fill the columns. Density: I make this mistake often. I end up chaining multiple thoughts rather than splitting them up into discrete sentences that link thoughts together. It maybe easier to write but it's harder to read. I use commas for things that can be mentally skipped and lists, and semicolons for related sentence fragments. It's probably an anti-pattern to use semicolons except as a greater grouping like: do you want apples, pears, and bananas; chicken, fish, and beef; or lettuce, tomatoes, and onions?
- robertoandred 6y ago
- duckerude 6y agoI fed the first tech article I could find on NYT's front page (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/technology/silicon-valley-techies-rich-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/technology/silicon-valley...) into Hemingway: - Grade 12 (aim for 9) - 14 adverbs - 4 uses of passive voice - 7 phrases have simpler alternatives - 14 of 72 sentences are hard to read - 30 of 72 sentences are very hard to read That's very close to the score of the 2010 article, the biggest difference is the lower number of adverbs. I'm guessing nothing has changed and there've always been outliers. (This is one article, I don't read the NYT, and I can't comment on the subjective quality of the piece, so take this with a grain of salt.)
- TwoBit 6y agoOr maybe this Hemingway scoring is bunk.
- duckerude 6y agoI don't think it's a good measure of overall quality. But if the writing became less crisp (as the article claims) I'd expect the score to change.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 6y ago> 4 uses of passive voice Use of passive voice is and always has been pretty common in journalism; I'd wonder if this Hemingway thing is actually an appropriate tool for evaluating journalism, just based on that.
- ncmncm 6y agoMost people who think they know have, in fact, no idea what "passive voice" means. (E.B. White, of Strunk & White, e.g., certainly didn't.) Things they claim are aren't. Very likely, the tool doesn't either; if it gave the right answer, people would insist it was wrong. Whenever I find a stray copy of S&W, I throw it away. I have tossed a bunch. Everything in it is either trivial or wrong. The trivial parts wouldn't make a book, so White added lots of wrong. After his teacher, Strunk, died, White made up a bunch more fake rules, and then went back and doctored Strunk's text to obey them. But he didn't even notice he was violating them in his own text. For the detailed rundown, search "nasty book pullum strunk".
- oxymoran 6y agoProbably about the same time that they decided that being honest and making money couldn’t really go hand in hand anymore.
- gambler 6y ago>I think a problem is that modern newspapers cater to an audience that’s expected to be very plugged in to the cultural and political topic of the day, or at least fake it. Spot on. The point of this style of writing isn't to provide you with information about new events. The point is to provide framing/spin for people who are already familiar (albeit uperficially) with occurring events. At some point I stopped consuming news for several years. When I attempted to read NYT front page after that multi-year pause I couldn't understand a thing. All the titles and articles were referencing people and events I'm "supposed to" be familiar with.
- keiferski 6y agoI always thought the once a week Sunday paper format was a blessing in disguise. It forced writers to sum up the week in a way that anyone could pick up and understand. If you go to nytimes.com right now, there are a bunch of stories which are clearly in medias res. It feels like jumping into the 5th episode of a Netflix series.
- alisonkisk 6y agoPeople talk about "slow news". I'd like a weekly or monthly "current events" review more than news, except for major timely events like an election or natural disasters. What happened to "newsweek"?
- relaxing 6y ago> What happened to "newsweek"? The internet happened, and it became The Daily Beast, and then it became a zombie publication with nothing in common with the old print edition.
- yoz-y 6y agoI have the same problem when talking politics with my father, or other people who follow the scene very closely. Instead of saying "the prime minister" or "the minister of education", they will use their names. Sometimes even for mayors or people who may have appeared on TV (which I don't watch) once. Like the author I feel exhausted and always have to ask who's who and why is that important. Of course one option is to get interested in politics, but already being very bad with names and faces I feel like it's a waste of time.
- chadlavi 6y agoImagine if you were underpaid and overworked and your code that you stayed up until 3am writing went to production right away with no code reviews, and no one really cared because your code was sort of just filler to hold the space between ads. EDIT: actually, even more dangerously: it's not just filler between ads, but also something that other people point to as a source of truth. Even though it was just cranked out by someone underpaid, overworked, and completely unedited/fact-checked.
- konjin 6y agoMore like: imagine if your code wasn't run on computers but written by hand, then it was rated by hn comments and finally the highest scoring comment was put into production which happened to be a fully automated pace maker used by millions.
- captain_price7 6y agoWhile I agree with the main point, the specific criticisms author presented here made me even more confused than the NYT article he was criticizing. For example: > The “though they’d like it if you’d follow them on Instagram” aside doesn’t even make any sense. What does big social media making community feel global have to do with soliciting likes on Instagram? It means although The Drunken Canal was created as a reaction to giant online media, they (i.e. The Drunken Canal ) still use at least one such media (i.e. Instagram) themselves.
- AndrewLiptak 6y agoThere's a couple of things that I've thought about when it comes to this sort of thing (speaking as a journalist and someone who's taught journalism to college students). - There's certainly an element where writers and audiences have an understanding about what they're writing about, and thus, you get stuff that's a bit more "inside baseball" that's a little harder to understand if you're not in the know. Like, jump from sports writing to economics to entertainment writing, and they all have their own quirks and tropes. - Not necessarily the NYT, but my local paper has a lot of errors, and I know they don't have a copywriter on staff (they just advertised for one) — it's clear that their writers aren't catching stuff. I know this is a much bigger problem around the news world: copywriters are often the first to be culled during layoffs, and a good copywriter is a valuable resource. - Writers are human, and we make mistakes. I know I work to read over everything out loud before turning it in to catch errors, but even then, I miss stuff. It happens, but you move on and try and correct mistakes that you're made aware of moving forward.
- slowmovintarget 6y agoDo you think part of the lack of good copywriting is due to the private equity squeeze on local papers?
- HDMI_Cable 6y agoThis might be because the New Yorker (and other fancy newspapers) need to differentiate their writing from the very direct, straight to the point writing we see online nowadays. Instead of getting straight to the point, they meander on in an attempt to sound smarter.
- acwan93 6y agoOne thing that irks me about The New Yorker is their liberal use of diacritics. They've added umlauts to words with consecutive vowels like "cooperate" (coöperate) and "reelect" (reëelect), when it hasn't been a part of conventional American English (or any regional variant?) for quite some time. It comes across as pretentious, which may be what they're going for and what their target audience wants to feel when they read The New Yorker.
- volkk 6y agoi really like the new yorker, but it is 100% pretentious and it seems like the people who read/collect the magazines always fall into a bucket of "look how smart and well read i am"
- rsynnott 6y agoAs the New Yorker will tell you, rather grumpily, it's not an umlaut: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-... > She [journalist] said that once, in the elevator, he [style editor] told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died. The lesson is, it seems, don't mess with the not-umlaut.
- slowmovintarget 6y agoThey can't all be fans of Spinal Tap. Those lead to mispronunciation of the words, in the examples you cite. edit: ah... because they're not umlauts, they're diaeresis. Still, unneeded.
- burntoutfire 6y agoIt seems to me that they try to make their matter-of-fact stories into quasi-prose. This doesn't work and result is mostly just boring.
- offtop5 6y agoThis is what happens when you spend decades demonizing journalism. Instead of giving us insightful articles, the New York times is competing against Facebook and Twitter to grab your attention immediately. I have a feeling most people don't read an entire New York times article, the entire point is just to create headlines you can share on Facebook or Twitter, keep those clicks and kpis flowing! In a way this is fantastic, we shouldn't have two or three newspaper owners running almost all media under the vestedge of prestige.
- reedjosh 6y agoI think you have to go non-ad funded for real journalism. I like https://substack.com/ https://substack.com/, but there are plenty of other like sources available.
- mc32 6y agoWonder if one wrote articles that contradict themselves (conclusion contradicts the initial thesis) how many people would have read to the end to discover that the end invalidates the initial idea.
- zozin 6y agoNot exactly sure what you mean by "decades demonizing journalism"? Who is doing the demonizing? Decades? Paper journalism's death has been exacerbated by the Internet, but it was dying long before the WWW was a thing. Radio, cinema, and television all played a role in killing off paper journalism. At the height of their popularity newspapers weren't just a method of conveying cold hard facts, they were a form of entertainment. It's not surprising that the least visually engaging medium is dying off when there are dozens of other more visually, and in turn emotionally engaging mediums, competing for eyeballs.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThis theory doesn't work because the decline has nothing to do with print. Look at where cable news is now -- it's somehow, seemingly impossibly, even worse than the NYT. It's as if CNN and MSNBC looked at Fox News and reacted with a jealously-based compulsion to outmatch their pathology.
- not2b 6y agoNewspapers used to have copy editors, people whose only job was to make sure that the kinds of mistakes the article refers to didn't get into print. Now they usually don't. That's why writing in newspapers got so bad. Edit: ninja'd.
- vntok 6y agoThis is the key insight. If you want not insta-news but deep, correct, insightful information, you should read publications that still employ multiple copy editors. I for one work with a bunch of newspapers where these roles are still highly respected today; their presence alone explains why the output quality is much much better than their competition's, all other things being equal. Typically, these people are authorized to edit any content needed without necessarily getting the writer's approval (it's baked into the writer's contract). They catch typos and fix grammatical errors, of course, but they will also check every single sentence multiple times for inaccuracies. They phone third parties, check that every word used is the correct one, make sure dates and events are exact, check arguments for syllogisms, fight with the author at times for the use of a particular word or expression in lieu of another, and so on so forth. No matter how senior and respected, the journalists always approach these people with fear and awe when they get quizzed about their articles. Any approximation results in either the whole sentence getting axed or the author being forced to rewrite and resubmit (on their dime).
- keiferski 6y agoSomething that I think is rarely discussed when this topic comes up is the loss of prestige. Working for The New York Times or The New Yorker used to have some weight with pretty much everyone in the country. That is no longer the case. It hasn't been so for at least a couple of decades. Extremely erudite-yet-mostly-apolitical people like Lewis Lapham [1] went to literary magazines and high-end journalism a half-century ago, whereas today they almost certainly avoid it. I can't name a single person that I'd consider the modern equivalent of Lapham, or even Christopher Hitchens. In some sense, journalism used to be a popular career choice for upper class kids with a deep interest in literature. Today, it seems more like an ideological battleground than a search for truth. [1] I really recommend his magazine, Lapham's Quarterly and its podcast, The World in Time. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/world-in-time https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/world-in-time
- sdenton4 6y agoI think much of the journalism of ideas is happening in podcasts now. Podcasts certainly more of a frontier right now, with lots of people (still!) trying out interesting things, compared to the shrinking world of print journalism. 'Rough Translation' with Gregory Warner is one of the best, imo. The idea of to take important stories in the US and find analogues in other countries, and look at how they've played out. Consistently fascinating. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510324/rough-translation https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510324/rough-translation
- A12-B 6y agoI don't think you're wrong (I don't know enough), but it's quite the caricature of entrepreneur culture to say that podcasts are doing journalism better than the journalists. NYT is one paper, from one city. The scope of print journalism is vast and probably defeats podcasts 100 to 1.
- sdenton4 6y agoMany of the people doing the best work in podcasting are journalists, make no mistake! Many who either are currently or formerly were at NPR, rotating long time contributors to This American Life, etc. For the most part, podcast reporting is closer to magazine reporting than newspapers. ('Democracy Now' is maybe the exception that proves the rule?) But given the survival rate of magazines at this point in history, it's obvious that podcasts are where you're going to see more innovation.
- underseacables 6y agoNewspapers could be suffering from a race to the bottom in terms of hiring the cheapest (and probably less skilled) talent. With all of the financial woes compounded, hiring recent J-school graduates versus investing in those with more experience, may be showing the inexperience in print.
- AmVess 6y agoTalent costs money. Money most can't afford to pay. Back when papers actually had money, those at the top weren't paid well to begin with. The major paper in the state I used to live in went completely out of business and had their building repossessed. It was resurrected some time later and is now 8 pages long. Most of that is AP news and cartoons and crossword. Last I looked, there was barely 2 pages of news including the AP articles. Their pay is so low, one would make more money working at the supermarket as a cashier.
- gxqoz 6y agoIs this really the case? My sense is that newspaper writing went from something of a working-class profession to one that requires extremely high credentials. Certainly the most elite publications like the New York Times are basically only hiring from the Ivy League.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoI also sense that newspapers are retaining the old guard talent at the expense of younger, more fresh voices. For instance the New York times constantly puts peices up by Paul Krugman and he almost never writes anything insightful. Given his credentials, I assume he commands a high price for his commentary. I assume the business side thinks name recognition is more important than taking risks on new writers.
- jtdev 6y agoWhen did communicating wokeness become so important to many/most newspapers? I suspect that the two are closely correlated.
- cratermoon 6y agoSometime in the 80s when the major networks decided the newsroom, which had been a cost sink but was considered prestigious, should at least be able to pay for itself. The networks were losing profits to cable channels. As they cut costs and demanded revenue, the quality of broadcast news went to hell. Oh, and President Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. https://publicseminar.org/essays/ronald-reagans-worst-decision-created-rush-limbaugh/ https://publicseminar.org/essays/ronald-reagans-worst-decisi... Newspapers somewhat followed suit, but they had always been ad-supported, so it wasn't until Craigslist and the like came along and took their classified income that they really started to feel the pinch. Fast-forward to the early 21st century and the rise of click-bait news sites; newspapers couldn't compete. Papers also started getting snapped up by private equity firms, doing what private equity firms do. Editing was the first casualty, but then pay for writers went on a race to the bottom. Good writers mostly abandoned the news and became freelancers, writing copy for whatever outlet would pay them. tl;dr late-stage neoliberal capitalism happened.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aerovistae 6y ago> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. I found this interesting, because it seemed unbelievable to me that an app could be able to tell good writing from bad writing in a reliable or useful way. So I took excerpts from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and pasted them in. (For anyone unfamiliar with it, The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, and is widely taught in American high schools.) The excerpts I pasted were almost universally painted red: bad writing, "very hard to read." Then I took excerpts of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over. Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator -- red and yellow all over. Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original Winnie the Pooh books. Finally, something it was mostly okay with! But only the dialogue. Anytime the author dared to write any description, red all over. Seriously, don't use this tool. Edited perspective from comment replies to mine: the app is largely okay with Hemingway, which makes sense as its main intent is to make your writing like Hemingway's. Also, if it is largely intended to be for business writing, then it makes sense that it would react poorly to literary writing. Both good points!
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoIt’s a great example of how people will use an easy quantification just because it exists. There’s a popular mindset that seems to think you can’t argue against numbers and math because they’re cold and scientific. Who cares if its a stupid number, it’s mathematically/scientifically correct!
- keiferski 6y agoNew tools, same old tricks. We've just upgraded from turtle shells to web apps.
- jimmaswell 6y agoA measure that becomes a target often stops being a good measure.
- varispeed 6y agoIf you read how most major newspapers used to write about drugs, particularly cannabis, then you learn they have always been bad, manipulative and sleazy. They have to keep certain line of reporting to keep their licenses, but also money flowing in from interested parties, e.g. pharmaceutical industry. I don't believe there is one trustworthy outlet - it's all politics and corruption so best is read as much sources as you can on a topic that interests you and find truth yourself.
- TrispusAttucks 6y agoThis is everywhere not just major newspapers. I experience it frequently in verbal conversation. There is solipsistic change taking place in discourse were people assume you already have their knowledge in your head. It's to the point where I have to play 24 question and then summarize the story to include all the facts to make sure I have it correct. Totally possible I'm the strange one and see ambiguity where others do not.
- sunopener 6y agoOh... I could have sworn the "solipsistic change taking place in discourse" was that no one truly knows anything, that we're all just making shit up and stacking the shit into empires--indulging the pastime of 'bullshit-science' because we're afraid to admit we "don't know" and that ultimately the only thing we are in control of regarding knowledge is that of completely letting go of control. When you think about it, we don't even know what knowledge is--what is it to posses (can it even be possessed?) the 'essence of knowledge'? Kinda makes you wonder if knowledge is nothing but the 'spiralcy study' of inevitable and ineffable Death--If all was known, could we really claim anything was ever truly alive?
- 8ytecoder 6y agoA lot of publications have gone really bad in just the last few years. Back home we learnt English from newspapers. My English would be terrible if I attempt it now. British publications FT and The Economist still hold their standards high. They both have quality, well-researched content with commendable language to back it up.
- colincooke 6y agoThe Economist (which I'm very familiar with) to me should be a model of how newspapers should operate. Make their biases up-front and clear (The Economist is written for and by believers in liberalism) but then report the facts well and clearly. It does help that they manage to tie in some nice british humour to make articles engaging. I think it also helps that it is a weekly publication, which regularizes the sensationalist events of the day.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yoz-y 6y agoIs this true of print articles as well? Before, when the articles had to fit a particular surface on paper, there were rules to write the article in a way that it could be comfortably cut after any paragraph and still make sense. So the first paragraph would contain a high level overview summary, then the details would pile up. Of course it's harder and more time consuming to write like that, but it avoids the overly embellished style that many internet publications (be it newspapers or blogs) have nowadays.
- slowmovintarget 6y agoThat's because journalism schools and editors used to teach a style of writing that maximized conveyance of fact. That economy of writing is less needed with the internet, especially when many stories often have the singular fact that someone tweeted something. I feel a "get off my lawn" rumbling deep down in my subconscious when I think about things like this.
- legitster 6y agoI write semi-professionally, and it amazes me how much you have to unlearn from your time in college, which required unlearning from your time in high school, which required unlearning from your time in grade school. I still remember a horrifying 2-page (gasp!) paper from 5th grade where the requirements where so stringent (The 5th sentence has to be a thesis statement! Start each paragraph with a transition. Each paragraph has to support the thesis.), writing it mostly meant plugging in key words in the template like a mad-lib. And it really messed up my writing for a while. When trying to convey nuanced topics, I often feel like a Neanderthal (no offense I guess?) trying to bang adjectives together hoping for meaning to appear. I think a lot of the stuff I was taught about composition and sentence structures was worse than not learning anything. And I wish I could go back and learn from an actual writer instead of a teacher. I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill".
- silvestrov 6y agoBullet points (and tables) were also a taboo in high school, but can be very useful when communicating a list of choices. High School also required a minimum length of essays, but when writing online to customers, you want to avoid long paragraphs.
- tylerrobinson 6y agoSince we’re getting more into pedagogy here... I think this falls into the category of learning the rules so you know which ones to break. Several years ago, I was helping an underachieving high school student write a persuasive essay and she was helplessly lost. She didn’t know what the five-paragraph format was (intro, discussion point 1, discussion point 2, discussion point 3, conclusion). Without that, this was just a complete failure of an essay, or maybe an assignment never completed. If she had learned and practiced the 5th grade style that you learned, this persuasive essay in high school would have been a piece of cake. She’d be able to structure her thinking and communicate a point.
- iamatworknow 6y ago>I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill". I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, especially in the context of news media. As an American public school millennial I distinctly remember covering the term "yellow journalism" in social studies classes in multiple years. But the moral I always took from those lessons was "Back in the past, like at the time of the Spanish-American war, the news media fudged the facts to push their own agenda". Yellow journalism was just a vocabulary term used for something that happened a long time ago. We weren't taught to apply the lessons to our modern lives, which would've been infinitely more valuable than memorizing flash cards. I can't help but think that the whole fake news thing would've been much less of a surprise to people of my generation had a bit more time been spent on learning applicable lessons using history as a context, and not just remembering trivia. Likewise when we had research projects or essays to write, it was just as you said -- a fill in the blanks exercise. If you found a book in the library that had something relevant you could reference, well, it was a book in the library, so it was obviously true, right? You're going through the motions but you're not thinking for yourself. I didn't get a real introduction into how to actually do research until my first year of college.
- Nimitz14 6y agoJust because you don't like a piece of writing does not mean the writing is bad. > I have so many questions. > Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication? > Something like this would be more clear: It's also more boring. There are people who like things to be a bit more entangled, as real life often is, and that's what that writing caters for. -- People like this guy who seem to be believe there's only one correct way to write, who actually believe you can put writing that is supposed to be pushing the envelope into "an app that identifies poor writing" and use the results piss me off. Grammarly and similar have their uses of course, but I dread the day people actually use it to clamp down on anything that's slightly different than the norm (as this guy is doing), and everyone will be forced to write in a style that conforms with what an ML model says is okay. It is my personal nightmare.
- Veen 6y agoThere will always be moaning philistines and there will always be people who regard them with the contempt they deserve, so don’t despair.
- andjd 6y agoAuthor complains about bad writing and includes the following error before the fold: `her decision to not include an piece` Pointing this out for the irony, not to denigrate what the author has to say.
- SourPatch 6y agoI've been seeing this a lot online in the past few years and it has been driving me crazy. Has the a/an rule of writing been updated? I'm talking about examples like the one above, not stuff like "an historic."
- berniemadoff69 6y agoHave you ever noticed how the general mood of newspapers (at least in the New York Times and the Washington Post) is a feeling of despair? This is easily noticeable when looking at the photography [0]. You can pick up a Sunday copy of the NYT, or even open up the NYT's twitter, scroll around, and observe how many stories' lead image is of someone looking off with a kind of gloomy gaze in their eye. I assume years of data analytics and testing has proven this formula will consistently get clicks. [0] https://twitter.com/nytimesGLOOM https://twitter.com/nytimesGLOOM
- relaxing 6y agoPossibly because it mirrors the national mood? https://news.gallup.com/poll/311228/national-mood-shows-little-improvement-may.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/311228/national-mood-shows-litt...
- karaterobot 6y ago> Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication? I generally agree with his thesis, but: Scoring articles with the Hemingway app is a red herring that distracts from the point he was making. Hemingway just measures sentence complexity as a stand-in for clarity of writing. But, the issue with excerpts like the one above was not that they were too complex, but that they left out the context and explanations which a reporter should usually prioritize over style. Dropping text into Hemingway is easy, but it's clearly meaningless in this case, and gives people an opportunity to dismiss his thesis by quibbling with the application.
- egberts 6y agoIt’s all about the partial fact and building up a (often political) narrative, coupled with so few mega-corporations controlling the US media. Until some semblance of Fairness Doctrine returns, this crappy journalism shall continue.
- fullshark 6y agoWhen they started rewarding young writers with a lot of twitter followers and kicked out all the high salaried veterans.
- xiii1408 6y agoI expected this to be complaining about the loss of complex literary writing in favor of more simple, sensationalist style. It's not. Basically, he pastes part of a New Yorker article in Hemingway, a tool that evaluates the reading level of a text and flags it if it's more complex than a ninth grade reading level. Spoiler: the New Yorker piece has too many big words and more complex sentences than what you'd write to target a ninth grade audience. He then does this for a longer New York Times think piece, also written in a New Yorker-like style. What do you expect? These are not news articles, these are think pieces, even though one of them is published in the New York Times. They're supposed to be literary, which sometimes means having words more complex than a ninth grade level and sentences longer than what Hemingway would write. If you tried this on an actual news article, where the style is often simpler, you might get a different result.
- screye 6y agoFor centuries, Journalism was the art of investigation and power brokers. Journalists were civilian detectives and their media outlet was the badge that let them enter crime scenes. Once the information was obtained, began its next task: wielding their power to subtly craft a narrative and manufacture consent. It was a fine balance. 90% of the time you reported facts, so that you could bend the truth the other 10% of the time. The monopoly over facts, lent them this power. The nature of Journalism has completely changed with the advent of the internet. You don't require as many people on the ground, and the access afforded to high resource high prestige outlets is not very useful. Opinions, realtime updates and news is broadcasted straight through tools like Twitter. Information is decentralized and free. Thus, Journalists role has now become to exclusively broker power. The narrative is all that matters. Everyone knows the news anyway. This is where new media began spiralling. Pushing narratives is the only value you can provide, but the power needed to get buyin for the narratives was lent by a monopoly over facts, that isn't there anymore. note: The collapse of the NYT specifically is rooted in an entirely separate generational struggle. This does not address it.
- RaCaS123 6y agoIt seems that if you use more than 2 commas in a sentence it is considered bad writing.
- chrisan 6y agoReference Article: > But her friend and editor, Claire Banse, also 23, had told her the paper had already hit its quota on the word “retarded” and she’d objected. (What else rhymes with “departed”?) Author of post: > Wait, what does it mean to have a quota on a word? Are they not using that word enough or are using it too much? Can someone explain how "already hit its quota on the word" could mean they are not using that word enough? And even past that, how could you think when taking into account the context of "retarded" make you think "hit its quota" means there was desire for more use of "retarded" in an article? I am confused on how this person is confused
- noxer 6y agoWait, people actually read the text under the headlines? /s
- doggodaddo78 6y agoMost print and TV reporters aren't serious writers, just communication majors and glorified bloggers.
- firstfewshells 6y agoAll newspapers in India have reduced the number of pages in their print edition by 30-45%. The paper with the highest circulation in India, The Times Of India, has become so commercial it's now known as the The Ads of India. Every front page and literally every second page has either full page or half page ads. The quality of the journalism is abysmal with super shallow articles and grammatical errors. The websites of the newspapers are even worse with headlines always revolving around cricket and entertainment. In fact, some regional news websites have "Ask the Sexpert" on their main page. It's a cesspool.
- SeanLuke 6y agoI've found editing, not writing, to have gone right down the drain in modern newspapers. It's clear many stories are poorly edited if at all. I don't want to be That Guy, but I've also noted a huge increase in terrible, incredible examples of the need for the Serial Comma, all by clueless editors. One big one was last week in the WP: > Jackson’s former colleagues vastly disapproved of his conduct and leadership within the White House Medical Unit, including screaming, belittling colleagues and fits of rage, which demoralized nurses and doctors, the report found. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/03/03/ronny-jackson-report-dod/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/03/03/...) So what we've learned is that Jackson's conduct and leadership somehow included rounding up colleagues who screamed and belittled. And the presence of these horrible colleagues, plus his fits of rage, demoralized nurses and doctors...
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoYour example seems perfectly cromulent to me. Obviously an uncharitable reader could interpret it differently, but human language is inherently ambiguous and readers are used to determining how to read lists in context.
- SeanLuke 6y agoI'll bet you also say that to your parents, Ayn Rand and God. The serial comma is meant to remove ambiguity. This passage is not just ambiguous, it's most obvious parse is completely wrong. I think it's a great example of why the serial comma is so important.
- rossdavidh 6y agoWanted: a curated list of quality journalists, with Patreon accounts or similar, looking for independent backing so that they can spend the time to write news articles of real quality, at a reasonable pace. That sentence was probably too long, but perhaps you understand what I mean anyway. If this already exists, please inform me where.
- macintux 6y agoThis bizarre construction popped up last week in an article about the New Zealand quakes: > Only around one or fewer earthquakes of 8.0-magnitude or greater occur each year. I imagine it’s hard to write cleanly and get copy editing when everything has to be online 15 minutes ago.
- TheMagicHorsey 6y agoNot only is the style bad. The journalists all seem to have a rather narrow and uniform political agenda now. I don't see any suspicion of large, centralized projects, the way they used to be suspicious of these things in the past. Its enough now it seems for a political group to declare that there is a particular purpose for a policy, and the policy is analyzed strictly from the perspective of its goals ... nobody seems to talk about tradeoffs and other possible outcomes in any great depth. Which is tragic, given how failure prone almost every Federal grand program has been in the long run, from the war on drugs, to the war in Iraq, to housing subsidies, to subsidized student debt.
- bww 6y agoSummary: a blog about machine learning is criticizing the writing in a culture magazine for being too florid. His argument is that all writing, no matter the audience, should be written in a terse, declarative style at an 8th grade reading level. He attempts to justify this ludicrous opinion by using "Hemingway", a presumably-ML-powered robot copy editor app, to prove that this magazine is "hard to read". There, I saved you ten exasperating minutes.
- jpttsn 6y agoYou saved the reader time by writing clearly?!
- MrMan 6y agoI was going to run your comment through the Hemingway app but when I googled it I got to a site which has an expired SSL cert, and then instead of it being a harmless free hobby project where you paste text in, they want me to buy a 20 dollar app. Nice try, growth hackers critiquing NYT.
- jamesfe 6y agoThe author makes one mention of New York Times, the target of his confusion, but only in the very last sentence. Maybe he's the bad writer? Cherry-picking ten bad sentences from tens of thousands written per day seems like a long-tail metric or anecdotal at best.
- hinkley 6y agoWilliam Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, according to my journalism class.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- avree 6y agoIt's funny that the author makes several mistakes in this piece criticizing writing. The first jumped off the page at me: "She is involved in The Drunken Canal, a regional print publication based New York City" This is also bad writing: “Honor Levy was conflicted about pulling her piece from The Drunken Canal, a regional New York print paper she began last year. She had several short stories published in the New Yorker, but this felt different.” Regional is a redundant descriptor if New York is included. Just saying "regional" would make the sentence flow better. "Print paper" also doesn't have meaning, it's something the author made up.
- gota 6y agoTerm 'regional' speaks to the "scope" (the circulation? ) of the paper. It is not at all redundant with 'New York', a paper can be 'regional' anywhere, right? And 'print paper' is not meaningless, even if the author made it up. In context it clearly means not-an-online paper. Both terms are indicating limited reach of pieces published in The Drunken Canal.
- Veen 6y ago> Regional is a redundant descriptor if New York is included. No it’s not. There’s a difference between being based in a region and being a publication that serves a region. The NYT is based in NY, but it’s not a regional publication.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoWhen word processors were invented. After that, it was hard to get a job as Editor. Because everybody could write now! But without an Editor, writing went downhill and is now circling the drain.
- carapace 6y agoIs this the right place to complain about the death of the hyphen? Poor old hyphen.
- bwanab 6y agoI’m going to guess that given the sharp reduction in staff at all newspapers, what you are looking at is a “get it out” mentality that doesn’t give writers and editors the time to spend that would result in clear, informative language.
- twobitshifter 6y agoMy writing has become worse over the years. This is probably a lack of exercise, as I am primarily a consumer, but some of it may be caused by reading lower quality writing online. The NYTimes would not take the blame for my personal decline, but online content by others could be affecting its writers. Hackernews wise, I have spent hours searching for a copy of the old UNIX writer’s workbench project, but haven’t found it anywhere. From what I’ve read these tools can do much more than the “Hemingway” tool used in the article.
- mjparrott 6y agoIn 2016 when objective journalism died in major news institutions. Since then it is a cesspool of opinion pieces and advertising masquerading as content.
- ceautery 6y agoThere's a picture of the Drunken Canal newspaper at the top of the NYT article you're talking about, and the very text you nitpick mentions "the publication's unmarked white newspaper box" so saying it's unclear what Drunken Canal is doesn't hold water. It's hard to assume good faith here.
- viburnum 6y agoReporters were never good at writing. Now that all the editors are gone we can see the difference.
- grawprog 6y agoMy main problem with most journalism today is the overuse of loaded adjectives specifically, but loaded language in general. It's rare to find a news story at all these days that reports something as 'X happened on this day. A and B parties were involved. Y was the consequence of X.' Instead news.is always reported more like. '&adjective, &adjective X was the most &loaded_descriptor event ever. The &negative_adjective, &dehumanizing_term A's, &negative_adjective &negative_verb the &positive_adjective B's. Everybody should hate the &negative_adjective A's.'
- voldacar 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_conjugation is a great skill to develop in the context of reading any media
- Animats 6y agoAfter newspapers got rid of "rewrite". Back when newspaper content came mostly from reporters who went out into the real world, newspapers had "Rewrite". Reporters would phone in stories, and Rewrite would rewrite them. They'd rewrite the copy in house style, and maybe look up some file info to add to the story. Then stories were passed to editors, who would edit them, putting copy-editing marks on them. Finally they went to the composing room, where typesetters typing on Linotypes would apply the editing corrections and often catch spelling errors. The copy of each story was tweaked by at least three people. Now, it's direct from author's keyboard to publication. The only intervention is spell check.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoI usually try and stay out of threads about publishing because I work in the industry and most of them are heated or incredibly vitriolic. (I'm employed in the industry as a software developer, not a journalist) But this time I'm a little amused. There's a lot of in-depth commentary by non-journalists about journalism. When non-software engineers comment about software development, or non-physicists comment about physical science there's usually much more ire for the lack of accuracy. And further, Substack (is that what's used instead of Medium now?) always seems to be posted with some kind of critique of every other journalistic outlet or platform. I guess that's how the new outlets get started now: react or rebel against something else? It worked for Canadaland and they've grown into their own so maybe it'll run a good course. But I think the article isn't good. Why make such a sweeping statement when you're really only assessing an article or two in one or two publications? Why treat all writing in a given publication as a common sum? They are editorialized and curated, but certainly not monolithic. It's so dismissive and hand-wavy that I can hardly believe it's ranked this highly on HN and I must only assume it's because everyone everywhere seems to love to pile on a few things these days, and they always end up popular: how "bad" modern journalism is, how much artists should be paid (usually nothing), and any even remotely politically-charged subject. And each time, the story or the comments seem to be empty of compassion or even base-level empathy and understanding. But I digress...
- mahogany 6y agoIt must be ranked highly just because of the clickbait headline and not the content. Because the content is vacuous. It's literally taking two cherry-picked articles a decade apart, pulling out a few bad and good lines, then feeding the articles into an app to assign and compare scores. I'm glad we have a robot to tell us what good writing is!
- gkoberger 6y agoI used to work for a well-known tech blog, and I kinda saw this happen in realtime. It's all about speed. The way articles would work would be that they'd be posted immediately by the author, and edited after. Sometimes they wouldn't actually get edited (after all, it was already out there and the views were already trending downward after an hour). And at best, the editing would just be spelling and grammar rather than structural, because you can't change a live blog post that much. So, the result was first drafts of articles were basically the final draft. I always hated it, but I don't know what else can be done? Google and Twitter and others give a huge boost to the first one with the story, and there's no much reward for doing it right.
- cafard 6y agoSince the memory of [this] man runneth not to the contrary. The Washington Post has for many years been well thought of. Back in the 1960s, Ben Bagdikian said that the problem with The Washington Post is that nobody edited it. Benjamin Bradlee hired him to do so, but he left after a couple of years. By the time I started reading the Post a few years later, I constantly ran into sloppy, badly edited writing.
- cbanek 6y agoJust a small point, but I feel like the editing has also gotten worse over time as newspapers have gone digital. I see spelling errors, punctuation and other problems in WaPo about once a week, and I don't even read it all.
- kjrose 6y agoThis article demonstrates the Michael Scott Theory of Social Class: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of... In short, they write "posturetalk" over reporting news. This is why these articles are written this way. It is not to inform, it is to peacock.
- musicale 6y agoShortly after the printing press was invented.
- ncmncm 6y ago> 8 use of passive voice "Uses", presumably. But the quoted bits had exactly one. Either the writer or the software doesn't know what passive voice is (or both!) or he is holding back the other seven. This style of writing seems very deliberate. I doubt it was not intended to be just this way.