When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

> Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication?

I generally agree with his thesis, but:

Scoring articles with the Hemingway app is a red herring that distracts from the point he was making. Hemingway just measures sentence complexity as a stand-in for clarity of writing. But, the issue with excerpts like the one above was not that they were too complex, but that they left out the context and explanations which a reporter should usually prioritize over style. Dropping text into Hemingway is easy, but it's clearly meaningless in this case, and gives people an opportunity to dismiss his thesis by quibbling with the application.

This is the key insight. If you want not insta-news but deep, correct, insightful information, you should read publications that still employ multiple copy editors.

I for one work with a bunch of newspapers where these roles are still highly respected today; their presence alone explains why the output quality is much much better than their competition's, all other things being equal.

Typically, these people are authorized to edit any content needed without necessarily getting the writer's approval (it's baked into the writer's contract). They catch typos and fix grammatical errors, of course, but they will also check every single sentence multiple times for inaccuracies. They phone third parties, check that every word used is the correct one, make sure dates and events are exact, check arguments for syllogisms, fight with the author at times for the use of a particular word or expression in lieu of another, and so on so forth.

No matter how senior and respected, the journalists always approach these people with fear and awe when they get quizzed about their articles. Any approximation results in either the whole sentence getting axed or the author being forced to rewrite and resubmit (on their dime).

This ignores the fact that journalism is a professional discipline with established ethical practices that is practiced by groups of journalists and editors together.

Now there's definitely an argument to be made that it routinely fails to live up to those standards and that it has certain structural weaknesses and biases that need to be addressed.

But it is, overall, a system of professionals who consider their work to be constrained in certain ways that are ethically important to them and the world. Individual podcasters might adhere to some of these standards but as a field it has no aspirations to that. Same with journalists leaving established papers to publish on substack with no editorial oversight. They are not practicing journalism as journalists see the field.

These things might replace journalism but they aren't it.

It’s all about the partial fact and building up a (often political) narrative, coupled with so few mega-corporations controlling the US media.

Until some semblance of Fairness Doctrine returns, this crappy journalism shall continue.

I don't think you're willing to pay what it would actually cost. Not calling you a liar, just noting that a truly local news source, operating at the level that they did 20 years ago, would cost so much more today.

The revenue for a local paper used to come primarily from advertising that doesn't exist anymore. Movie theater listings, classified ads, auto dealership sections. The Real Estate "section".

Each of those have been picked off by apps and websites. Craigslist, IMDB, Redfin/Zillow, etc.

And it's a spiral. With each reduction in circulation, the attractiveness for advertisers drops. Any attempt to make up the shortfall with higher subscription rates just accelerates the downfall.

So we get conglomerates that try to manage costs by being "local" in name only. They can't afford to employ reporters in every town with 75,000 residents. You instead get local papers that are just a reskin of a common wire feed. A few easy articles that could be GPT'd from the police blotter. Maybe a blogger or two.