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When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
51–60 of 307 posts
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#52This 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 want news to return to the local level. Local news I am willing to pay for, because the information, and thus confidence in it, is closer to home and more identifiable.
Reminds me of a book by John Grisham{1} about a young journalist who buys a small southern newspaper, and turns it around by focusing on actual news.
{1}. The Last Juror
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#53Is this true of print articles as well?
Before, when the articles had to fit a particular surface on paper, there were rules to write the article in a way that it could be comfortably cut after any paragraph and still make sense. So the first paragraph would contain a high level overview summary, then the details would pile up.
Of course it's harder and more time consuming to write like that, but it avoids the overly embellished style that many internet publications (be it newspapers or blogs) have nowadays.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#54> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. 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, an…
It’s a great example of how people will use an easy quantification just because it exists. There’s a popular mindset that seems to think you can’t argue against numbers and math because they’re cold and scientific. Who cares if its a stupid number, it’s mathematically/scientifically correct!
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#55This might be because the New Yorker (and other fancy newspapers) need to differentiate their writing from the very direct, straight to the point writing we see online nowadays. Instead of getting straight to the point, they meander on in an attempt to sound smarter.
It seems to me that they try to make their matter-of-fact stories into quasi-prose. This doesn't work and result is mostly just boring.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#56I 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.
I think it's an elitism in the writing style. If you can write densely, it signals education.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#57Something 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-cent…
I think much of the journalism of ideas is happening in podcasts now. Podcasts certainly more of a frontier right now, with lots of people (still!) trying out interesting things, compared to the shrinking world of print journalism. 'Rough Translation' with Gregory Warner is one of the best, imo. The idea of to take important stories in the US and find analogues in other countries, and look at how they've played out.…
I don't think you're wrong (I don't know enough), but it's quite the caricature of entrepreneur culture to say that podcasts are doing journalism better than the journalists.
NYT is one paper, from one city. The scope of print journalism is vast and probably defeats podcasts 100 to 1.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#58> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. 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, an…
I have no intention of using Hemingway or anything like it, but I think it is obviously targeted at business communication, not literature, so it's unsurprising that it would find issues with literature excerpts.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#59This might be because the New Yorker (and other fancy newspapers) need to differentiate their writing from the very direct, straight to the point writing we see online nowadays. Instead of getting straight to the point, they meander on in an attempt to sound smarter.
One thing that irks me about The New Yorker is their liberal use of diacritics. They've added umlauts to words with consecutive vowels like "cooperate" (coöperate) and "reelect" (reëelect), when it hasn't been a part of conventional American English (or any regional variant?) for quite some time. It comes across as pretentious, which may be what they're going for and what their target audience wants to feel when they…
i really like the new yorker, but it is 100% pretentious and it seems like the people who read/collect the magazines always fall into a bucket of "look how smart and well read i am"
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#60> So I threw in the entire text into Hemingway, an app that identifies poor or confusing writing. 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, an…
You should see what it does to The Old Man And The Sea!
8 of 263 sentences are hard to read. 15 of 263 sentences are very hard to read.