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When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

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Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#21

Post by offtop5 »

This 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.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#23

Post by TwoBit »

vikbytes wrote: post #5

I 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 tel…

I don't know about those two scores, but the second paragraph was definitely simpler written.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#24

Post by keiferski »

Something 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

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#25

Post by underseacables »

Newspapers 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.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#26

Post by mrweasel »

zozin wrote: post #6

"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.

Journalism 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.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#27

Post by reedjosh »

offtop5 wrote: post #21

This 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 fant…

I think you have to go non-ad funded for real journalism.

I like https://substack.com/, but there are plenty of other like sources available.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#28

Post by LanceH »

mancerayder wrote: post #9

I 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 d…

It 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.

Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

#30

Post by mattbk1 »

zozin wrote: post #6

"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.

Journalism doesn't necessarily have to attract talented writers, just people who can write well enough to get the facts right.

(This sounds like I'm bashing journalists, but I'm not.)

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