5 ms·

> "it takes forever to get into the content of the article." I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something

> "it takes forever to get into the content of the article." I've found this is the style of American long-format journalism in general. Just look at something like The New Yorker: not to dispute the quality of their writing, but the word counts certainly skew high. Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct.

e17 5y ago
I agree, and if you consider Private Eye in particular, they make the New Yorker or The Atlantic look like the Proust. Having said that, the British periodical landscape is sorely lacking a good centrist/apolitical current affairs publication in the American style.
- auxym 5y ago
  The Economist? Or do you consider that too right leaning?
  - malandrew 5y ago
    The Economist hasn’t been right leaning for at least half a decade or longer now.
dorfsmay 5y ago
I know this is going to sound crazy, but give it a try sometime. When I lose track while reading an article, or find difficult to understand it, I stop and reading it bottom up, one paragraph at a time. First the last paragraph, then the one before that, etc... This cuts through directly to the conclusion, then the detailed explanations form particular to general (which works better for me) and I can skip the "excitement build up" at the top of the article.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  I second this. I applied it to this[1] super long winded article in New Yorker to get the gist of the article. This article is littered with these passages and it's super frustrating. In the end from my view point it's a shallow piece with very little new insights. FWIW the article didn't age well as India is being ravaged by the 2nd wave. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-p...
  - saurik 5y ago
    The New Yorker is a magazine, not a newspaper: it doesn't exist to quickly present information every day, but to provide entertaining writing once a month; reading it backwards to try to get to the point as fast as possible sounds as silly as doing the same to a movie or a book.
- pbronez 5y ago
  man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on. It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader comes away with a mostly complete and accurate understanding of the issue. More of THAT please.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of money on maximizing the time a reader is engaged with any given article. It's as if - and I know this sounds crazy - the articles were there just to hold the user down, while they're being exposed to something else...)
    - rcoveson 5y ago
      > Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid"... Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me. An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing. I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.
      - Angostura 5y ago
        Yeh, it's simply called pyramid structure.
      - thatcat 5y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism... It is ordered most relevant to least.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Sounds like the recommended way to read a research paper: (1) read the abstract; (2) if you're still interested, read the conclusion; (3) if you're still interested, read the body of the paper.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Excellent practice. I'll also frequently apply this to HN comment streams. 1. Collapse the top comment. It's frequently good, but also frequently is an avalanche of compounded hot takes. 2. Scroll to the bottom of the discussion. Odds are that comments are lower-quality, but not always. I collapse these as I go up, upvoting the underrated ones. Occasionally comment. 3. If there's a long stream of lower-quality / redundant comments, I'll collapse those as well. I really wish there were some way to surface more deeply-nested, high-quality comments. There isn't. (Though occasionally an email to mods will elevate one to a top-level comment.) There used to be a periodic HN curation. That no longer occurs AFAIU.
SamBam 5y ago
I love The New Yorker. I actually read several pages of it every night to my wife to help her fall asleep. And that's not actually a joke about it being boring. (Currently reading about the evidence for UFOs, it's highly interesting.) However, almost every article follows such a predictable format: Introductory section, full of all the interesting and tantalizing details, and stuff you actually want to find out about. Then section two: we jump back to the main subject's childhood, what clothes they were wearing when the journalist met up with them, how softly they speak. About two pages of biographical content. Section 3: we jump to the background of the story we're actually going to tell. Explain how it fits into the history of some movement or scientific question or whatever. The "point" of the article gets buried somewhere in sections 4 or 5, in between riffing on other people's dead ends and more biographical content.
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
> Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct. Here's a counterexample literary trainwreck from the BBC. Have a go at wading through this horror show. It appears to have been written deliberately to withhold the topic of the article from the reader, for as long as possible. The wholly uninformative title is just the beginning. Those with the necessary patience will eventually realise that the title is also plainly untrue. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771
- Angostura 5y ago
  Again, this is a feature story, not a news story.
renewiltord 5y ago
This is actually because of a cargo cult fetishization of longer texts. As most people moved to rapid consumption of many disjoint sound bites, knowledgeable people read more than headlines. Those who then wished to emulate these decided that anything long is meaningful leading to a fetishization of “long form” prose. You’ll see a pretty high correlation between fans of “long form”, readers of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and political inclination around being perceived as erudite. It’s one of those cargo cult mixed with a measure becoming a target.

e17 5y ago

I agree, and if you consider Private Eye in particular, they make the New Yorker or The Atlantic look like the Proust. Having said that, the British periodical landscape is sorely lacking a good centrist/apolitical current affairs publication in the American style.

auxym 5y ago
The Economist? Or do you consider that too right leaning?
- malandrew 5y ago
  The Economist hasn’t been right leaning for at least half a decade or longer now.

dorfsmay 5y ago

I know this is going to sound crazy, but give it a try sometime. When I lose track while reading an article, or find difficult to understand it, I stop and reading it bottom up, one paragraph at a time. First the last paragraph, then the one before that, etc... This cuts through directly to the conclusion, then the detailed explanations form particular to general (which works better for me) and I can skip the "excitement build up" at the top of the article.

vishnugupta 5y ago
I second this. I applied it to this[1] super long winded article in New Yorker to get the gist of the article. This article is littered with these passages and it's super frustrating. In the end from my view point it's a shallow piece with very little new insights. FWIW the article didn't age well as India is being ravaged by the 2nd wave. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-p...
- saurik 5y ago
  The New Yorker is a magazine, not a newspaper: it doesn't exist to quickly present information every day, but to provide entertaining writing once a month; reading it backwards to try to get to the point as fast as possible sounds as silly as doing the same to a movie or a book.
pbronez 5y ago
man... this is exactly the opposite of how news articles are supposed to be written. Good news articles should tell you everything in the headline. Then tell you everything again in the first body sentence. Then tell you everything again in the first paragraph. and the first page. And so on. It's supposed to be a fractal that unfolds additional detail as you press forward, while ensuring that even a casual reader comes away with a mostly complete and accurate understanding of the issue. More of THAT please.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid", and it's supposed to be the gold standard of journalistic writing. IIRC it's being taught as part of vocational education. And yet, news media are the last place you're likely to find articles written in this style. Somehow, they manage to deliver the exact opposite of what they should be. A fractal of confusion, recursively unfolding noise. (It's as if they were making a lot of money on maximizing the time a reader is engaged with any given article. It's as if - and I know this sounds crazy - the articles were there just to hold the user down, while they're being exposed to something else...)
  - rcoveson 5y ago
    > Yeah, it's called "inverted pyramid"... Narrow (succinct) at the top and broad (detailed) at the bottom seems like a normal pyramid to me. An "inverted pyramid" would be like one of those poems that describes fine details first and only in the last sentence reveals what it's been describing. I don't doubt that it's actually called that, but it seems backwards to me.
    - Angostura 5y ago
      Yeh, it's simply called pyramid structure.
    - thatcat 5y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism... It is ordered most relevant to least.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Sounds like the recommended way to read a research paper: (1) read the abstract; (2) if you're still interested, read the conclusion; (3) if you're still interested, read the body of the paper.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Excellent practice. I'll also frequently apply this to HN comment streams. 1. Collapse the top comment. It's frequently good, but also frequently is an avalanche of compounded hot takes. 2. Scroll to the bottom of the discussion. Odds are that comments are lower-quality, but not always. I collapse these as I go up, upvoting the underrated ones. Occasionally comment. 3. If there's a long stream of lower-quality / redundant comments, I'll collapse those as well. I really wish there were some way to surface more deeply-nested, high-quality comments. There isn't. (Though occasionally an email to mods will elevate one to a top-level comment.) There used to be a periodic HN curation. That no longer occurs AFAIU.

SamBam 5y ago

I love The New Yorker. I actually read several pages of it every night to my wife to help her fall asleep. And that's not actually a joke about it being boring. (Currently reading about the evidence for UFOs, it's highly interesting.) However, almost every article follows such a predictable format: Introductory section, full of all the interesting and tantalizing details, and stuff you actually want to find out about. Then section two: we jump back to the main subject's childhood, what clothes they were wearing when the journalist met up with them, how softly they speak. About two pages of biographical content. Section 3: we jump to the background of the story we're actually going to tell. Explain how it fits into the history of some movement or scientific question or whatever. The "point" of the article gets buried somewhere in sections 4 or 5, in between riffing on other people's dead ends and more biographical content.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago

> Articles in comparable British publications tend to be a lot more succinct. Here's a counterexample literary trainwreck from the BBC. Have a go at wading through this horror show. It appears to have been written deliberately to withhold the topic of the article from the reader, for as long as possible. The wholly uninformative title is just the beginning. Those with the necessary patience will eventually realise that the title is also plainly untrue. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771

Angostura 5y ago
Again, this is a feature story, not a news story.

renewiltord 5y ago

This is actually because of a cargo cult fetishization of longer texts. As most people moved to rapid consumption of many disjoint sound bites, knowledgeable people read more than headlines. Those who then wished to emulate these decided that anything long is meaningful leading to a fetishization of “long form” prose. You’ll see a pretty high correlation between fans of “long form”, readers of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and political inclination around being perceived as erudite. It’s one of those cargo cult mixed with a measure becoming a target.