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The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who
by hnmullany 6y ago
The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who own the Economist's "voice".
I interned at the Economist one summer in college and wrote two articles for it - the published articles bore a small relationship to what I had submitted. The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's of a certain age with an eclectic range of expertises, as far as I recall.
- rmk 6y agoThis is common. Most publication houses, including magazines and newspapers, have a 'house style' that is enforced by an editorial staff.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoThey can probably be replaced by a neural network in time, leaving humans to just doing content reviews.
- dominotw 6y agoDoesn't 'the voice' evolve overtime though? How can a neural network evolve on its own.
- coldtea 6y ago>How can a neural network evolve on its own. Same way as humans? Via training on new inputs?
- dominotw 6y ago> Via training on new inputs? There are no new inputs in this case because we got replaced editors with NN.
- coldtea 6y agoNothing stops us from feeding them the work of human editors in 2000000 other publications... Or their own work, as ranked by readers (e.g. their past posts that had the more views and better engagement).
- RobertKerans 6y agoNo. This is drastically missing the point of what The Economist (or almost any media org) is. It isn't trying to be an average from 20000000 other publications, or what an average of readers think, or what had good engagement stats (though obviously the latter is a good target for the application of analytical software). It's not a neutral voice, or some down-the-middle average of what readers liked. It's an entity with its own political goals.
- RobertKerans 6y agoIt's not even vaguely similar to a person, so how would that work? ln this example, if you had a hypothetical AI that understood the UK class system + the political system + the press system + the way these interlocking relationships work from a particular elite PoV then sure, but that's magical thinking. The actual written style is a small part of that; the other things are the inputs.
- coldtea 6y ago>ln this example, if you had a hypothetical AI that understood the UK class system + the political system + the press system + the way these interlocking relationships work from a particular elite PoV then sure, but that's magical thinking. It doesn't have to understand any of those in any "human" sense, where it would be able to articulate what it understood on a meta level, etc. It would just have to reinforce the right patterns and fuzzy connections that lead to success in writing credible looking articles....
- RobertKerans 6y ago> It would just have to reinforce the right patterns and fuzzy connections that lead to success in writing _credible looking articles_ We're probably at a point where we can manufacture shallow fakes of the current writing style, and I'm sure techniques like this will become prevalent (because convenience), but I feel you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It does need to understand these things. If it doesn't, then what it is is a mechanical reproduction of a current style of writing: that's a completely different category of thing, it's not even close to similar.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoTrain it every year on the senior editors' publication.
- philtar 6y agoSo we can't get rid of the senior editors after all?
- belinder 6y agoWhy get rid of them? Automatisation should not mean getting rid of people, it should mean letting them do other things. In this scenario the editors could spend more time on their own writing instead of having to look at junior writer's texts
- HenryBemis 6y agoEditors are not necessarily investigators. (metaphor/similar example follows) In the same sense that someone who reviews a (IT) technical procedure is not necessarily a systems administrator, but someone who sees things from an angle to ensure RACI model is followed throughout without any generalizations such as "backup is taken" (by who? using which tools? which systems/data are backed up? how often? how long do we keep the tapes? how often do we trash the tapes? where do we store the tapes?). I haven't taken a backup for more than a decade, but I would shred a backup procedure to pieces. If you remove me from the review cycle, I won't go back to writing procedures.
- sorokod 6y agoThe publications that were replaced by a neural network?
- elcomet 6y agoYou could do small random variations (evolving the network) and assign some score to them (either number of sales, or scores by the staff)
- dominotw 6y agoHopefully their editors are operating on principles other than increasing sales.
- xapata 6y agoReinforcement learning.
- ChrisLTD 6y agoIsn't that more or less what Grammarly Premium can do? I'm not a subscriber, but their site says it offers suggestions on tone and clarity.
- formercoder 6y agoI’d bet against this. Neural networks still don’t actually understand the text at all. I would imagine true understanding is required for this task. You can’t get to the moon climbing progressively higher trees.
- koyote 6y agoThis is very similar to how code bases are 'edited' to fit the coding style of the team/project/company. I guess the main difference is that code editing is done in collaboration with the author (code review) as opposed to an editor. If refactoring code did not have the potential side-effect of changing its run-time behaviour (or performance) I'd argue that software engineering would also benefit from a 'code editor' role :)
- rmk 6y agoMost companies institute code reviews and invest in tooling that stops nonstandard code (formatting and convention-wise) getting into the codebase, once they grow large enough. I think these two processes serve the same purpose, albeit with numerous exceptions depending on the seniority of the committer and reviewer(s) :)
- raverbashing 6y agoTrue. But given the examples in the article this is done in a masterful way. One place that does this, it's obvious and uncreatively done: Deutsche Welle for their English articles.
- cromka 6y agoI am guessing this could come as a side effect of proof-reading articles written by authors who don't write in English with a native fluency?
- raverbashing 6y agoCould be (though they have the capability to hire native speakers), or maybe they have a very cookie-cutter manual. (Not sure their German headlines have the same patterns but I think not, or at least it doesn't sound so unnatural)
- Ericson2314 6y agoIf Wikipedia is right > Smiley was born to middle-class parents Doesn't sound like the Economist
- unsui 6y agoIn the UK, "Middle Class" is more of a mindset than an economic class (although economic class is definitely a part of it). You can think of it more as the US middle-upper-class. This musical number from the UK comedy "Mongrels" more-or-less nails the mindset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yr4yEguWrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yr4yEguWrw
- Ericson2314 6y agoYeah I know the difference between economic and social class. I'm saying that's the wrong social class for the Economist.
- mandogcat 6y agoI'm British, have read the Economist in the past and a friend of mine interned there. I think "middle class" is bang on to describe their audience, which ranges from aspirational students to working professionals who want a quick news summary with some wit. Not many builders (working), dukes (upper) or Oxford faculty (upper middle) would be caught reading it. It's definitely seen as middlebrow fodder for undergraduates.
- bambax 6y agoLetters to the editor probably go through the same meat grinder. I sent a comment once, that was published. It had been entirely rewritten, with almost no loss of meaning but complete overhaul of style, and no indication that it had been the case. I didn't mind that it was rewritten, but thought they should disclose that fact. Edit: I mean I think they should make it clearer to readers that published letters have been rewritten, and in some cases, heavily.
- halhod 6y agowe do. all letters sent in by emailed in get the following autoreply: "The Economist thanks you for your letter, which has been passed to the author of the article. All letters are edited if selected for publication either in print or online. We will need to know where you are writing from, so please ensure you have supplied the name of the city, town or village and the country if that is not obvious. If you do not wish your letter to be published send an e-mail promptly to letters@economist.com."
- throw14082020 6y agoThat sounds insane. You want to rewrite a comment and still pin it on the comments author? Sounds North Korean esque, if the movie "The Interview" is a good representation of that.
- ectopod 6y agoEvery newspaper that I've ever read does this. There will be a blurb on the letters page saying something like "We reserve the right to edit letters". It's clear to both readers and correspondents. If you don't like the terms, don't engage. Edited to add: newspapers in the UK take libel law seriously so you have some confidence they won't grossly misrepresent your views.
- throw14082020 6y agoIs "everyone does it" a good argument?. Clear to all? Not according to @bambax. Also, libel law? Why are you bringing up libel law. Manipulation of comments and fake reviews isn't libel.
- arminiusreturns 6y agoAh, so all the crazy stuff Ive seen from them I should blame on the editors and not the individual writers? Good to know, of course just by reading it you know its the Oxbridge types in charge, and I dont consider that a good thing...
- aj7 6y agoCan’t stand the final sentence witticisms. Reduces the credibility of the entire article. You can almost hear those Oxford and Cambridge PhD’s chortling about their own cleverness. And no byline is a form of slavery.
- faichai 6y ago> No byline is a form of slavery Don’t be ridiculous. This is a feature not a bug. It helps discourage sensationalism and encourage a sober viewpoint that’s not designed to generate Twitter or Instagram followers. I wish more news sources would do this. With you on the witticisms though
- paganel 6y ago> The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's As an Economist reader for 15 years now and as a big Le Carre fan that’s exactly how I imagined them to be. Even though after the latest editor change there seems to have been a notable change in tone/style, most visible (for me) in the US-related section (calling a sitting US president names isn’t what I expected from The Economist).
- mojuba 6y agoIt's probably also why their articles never seem to start with On a gloomy morning of June 22, 2015... - the much hated opening of so many other magazines who probably think it's a good way of engaging the reader. I hate this style so much. The editors who encourage it have no idea how disengaging their style is. Kudos to the Economist for not doing this.
- mocha_nate 6y agoSeriously. When I see that, I do a mini-eyeroll and scroll to find the point of the article. The Economist does a good job of putting content first.