When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.