4 ms·
Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.
by dsnr 6y ago
Pro tip: Jump to paragraph 11 to skip the life story of the random person and get to the point.
- StavrosK 6y agoWhat's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.
- loceng 6y agoWe're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?
- lupire 6y agoCommunication is about co: sharing information that is wanted to be sent and wanted to be received. Readers aren't meant to be a captive audience for shaggy dog tales. The article is on the review of Journalism website, not a storytelling website. Overpacking a story with junk (how ironic!) makes it harder to spread the important ideas of the article, which hurts the author's goal.
- loceng 6y agoOh, you know the author's goal? Likewise, if it was published on the site - arguably the curators read the article and approved it - but because it doesn't fit your own expectations of the only kind of content you want there, then it's inappropriate? That sounds like gatekeeping and perhaps perfectionism.
- wpietri 6y agoDifferent people like different things. Rather than assuming the author, the editor, and various other reviewers are all idiots, perhaps consider that you are not representative of their typical audience.
- luckylion 6y agoThat's a good point. I feel like there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories. I don't know whether they'd read the article if it didn't come with a somewhat relatable story. Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority? To me, these articles look like those SEO recipe sites that are stuffed with random content because Google won't rank them as well if they just provided what the user is looking for.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
- luckylion 6y agoCertainly not always, sometimes you need the story context because it's about some particular thing happening. But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health. I get the impression that there are multiple things at work: some people really like those side-stories, and they're very easy to write. You'd have a much, much harder time filling a newspaper with facts, which makes it much more expensive.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health. But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X. Depending on who you are, those details could be important. If chemical X is known to be harmful, it opens up details into how Suzy and Michael got exposed and who exposed them. Is this a local problem or a national one? Are there alternative explanations for the bad things that have nothing to do with chemical X? The human interest details, meanwhile, clue you into socioeconomic and demographic factors which may be at play. (But also may not.) These sorts of stories are surfacing anecdotes. Hopefully fact-checked anecdotes. But not peer-reviewed papers, either. (All that said, I personally prefer publications that tend towards terseness.)
- dsnr 6y agoWhen I go to bed, I think about how I’m going to wake up next morning and have a hot cup of coffee, a marvelous breakfast and brush my teeth before sitting in the comfy armchair that I have next to the couch in my medium-sized living room. Then, when I wake up, I do all those things that I have in mind that I went to bed with, that I dreamed about while sleeping in my large wooden bed that I inherited from my grandmother who is not with us anymore. I loved my grandmother, we’ve spent such a great time together as we used to do our daily walks in the green park in front of our house and we watched all those dogs running around and birds chirping, while enjoying our ice-cream that we had acquired from the shop around the corner. Then I wake up, and I go on Hacker News to read about all those interesting and innovative things that happen around me all the time, while my little dog wags his tail and watches me as I click every link on the front page. Thank you for reading this.
- geoduck14 6y agoBut... you forgot to share your grandmother's recipe for making lemonade!
- loceng 6y agoThanks for writing it, whether in no, half or full jest - I appreciated it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI concur. I try to add as much “human” as possible into my writing and tech interaction. I feel that we have allowed technology to leech our humanity, and the consequences have been devastating. When we have people running multi-billion-node datasets, that have no empathy for the essential “humanity” of each node, we can have Jurassic-scale disasters.
- nuller 6y agoGo on..
- lupire 6y agoCan a cliche be a fad?
- StavrosK 6y ago> Can a cliche be a dad? This particular cliche has grandkids by now.
- merpnderp 6y agoHave to pad those word counts when you're paid for length. If you don't have eyeballs on your website for X amount of time per visit, how are advertisers to know they got their money's worth?
- jasode 6y ago>What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? Fyi, it's not a fad. It's what's called a "human interest" angle and some publications (like this rrj.ca website of this thread) have that editorial allowance for personal storytelling. (I made a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673) More examples of that include "The New Yorker", "Harper's" and other literary style magazines. The opposite examples of "just the facts" type of publishers would be "lwn.net" for Linux tech articles or The Economist magazine for business stories. You won't find articles beginning with personal things like, "When I was a little boy, my father took me to discover ice...blah blah blah...." The problem is that HN is an aggregation site that gets the [human interest] articles when some readers don't want it and we have no convention for tagging them to avoid annoying that subset of the audience.
- StavrosK 6y agoHmm, that's informative, thanks. I agree there's an expectation mismatch, but I also find the writing in those articles a bit formulaic. I guess I'm mostly annoyed because I'm expecting a "just the facts" style and getting "human interest" instead, but it's fair that there are people who prefer that style.
- vorpalhex 6y agoAny good sources on this kind of media "sausage making" meta detail?
- jaredwiener 6y agoI'm seriously thinking about a series of blog posts kind of diving a little bit into how news comes together. Any particular topics youre interested in?
- ghaff 6y agoAlthough I'd argue The Economist, while not having that form of literary style, does favor wordplay of various types so it's not really a great "just the facts" example. (Not a criticism in that I like their style in general.)
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago> how a random person overpacked This particular investigative journalist is over-preparing for interacting with sources. That is a literary device to color his avoidance of the services named in the headline.
- zoomablemind 6y agoWhy going that deep, if one can just 'get to the point' from the title alone? I would not comment, if it were somewhat disrespectful to the source and context of the article. It's a journalism oriented blog, and in this case, its target audience is practicing or student journalists. So the story is painted to relate to that audience's concerns. Also giving such a 'Pro tip' is equal to teaching HN readers how to use scrolling...
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoStarting with paragraphs of side-story primed my bullshit detector as well and it kept flagging this article: not only is there too much text that has little to do with the headline, the paragraphs that focus on the subject hide wild claims behind citations. "U.S. officials were reported to have said" is an honest attribution, but not a quality source. However, the author has to deal with the problem that rumors are all we have. There are no new facts in this article, it's a write up of what is known, garnished with tales of journalists at work, intended for those who are new to the topic. (Edit: skipping the first ten looses the explanation of "air-gapped device" and what "transcription" even is.) The relevant key elements for the topic are all there: undisclosed third parties, outsourcing to cheap labor, spy agency backdoors, governments wanting blanked access, subpoenas against sources and journalists, bad tech, bad laws, data breaches, hacks and overly broad clauses in the service contracts. But it is too shallow, not intended for those who already knew that and hoped for details and depth. For a moment the article even hit my advertisement detection due to the way the "list of transcription services" at the end is formatted, how brand names are sprinkled in, how the author tries to avoid making it too one sided (which is a good thing!) and how the investigative journalists approach is related to overpacking and old fashioned motels. I suspected a bait and switch: bait with a cautionary tale, switch into a sales pitch. But the author says he does not endorse any of the named services and the short reviews focus on problems with their policies. Overall i find it ok, even if it is a bit too heavy on the narrative of this journalist protects his sources, be like him for my taste. EDIT: i ran the literal quotes through google and i think these are interviews backing the article as primary sources. This is no bullshit, it's good and honest work.
- MaxikCZ 6y agoWhen the article starts like this one...: > When Michael Lista went to stay 10 days at a lonely, one-storey motel in Emerson, Manitoba ...I immidiatelly close the site and make a mental note of the "dont open links from this site again". Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one. I came to read info, not authors attempt at a short novel.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoWell the Magazine calls itself "[__] Review of Journalism" and many of the articles seem to start with a story about a specific journalist that is exemplary for the topic. It's a brand thing. If you really dislike it, then this magazine is not for you. Personally this narrative oriented style has me on edge about rhetoric subterfuge. It feels like a sleight of hand, like a Kansas City shuffle, like a trick to fly fiction, an advertorial, or opinion below the radar.