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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?

#191

Post by mrweasel »

cratermoon wrote: post #43
mrweasel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

Newspapers used to be great for local news. But now with layoffs they barely cover the usual local beats. They fill lots of space with "local" news that is actually written off in some corporate center by a few people that do a few minutes of googling. https://newrepublic.com/article/160534/desperate-last-days-l...

You can’t actually get local news anymore. There was a fire at a nursing home just a few km from my house. Only “reporting” available the next day was via a Facebook group for the local area. The papers that are small enough to cover it no longer exists and it not worth covering in the larger papers.

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

#192

Post by watwut »

andi999 wrote: post #135
aerovistae wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I suppose you could read some critical analysis of it if you're interested in why it's considered great; I'm no expert. For what it's worth I agree with its status in the canon: it's a powerful and carefully articulated story in a very compact form with a unique, exciting, and thought-provoking premise. The perfect short story.

Yes it is good entertainment, but wouldnt then the kids read those anyways?

No. Kids dont like to read all that much these days, they moved to another entertainment options.

One of big goals teachers and schools are having currently is to make at least some kids like reading enough so they do it.

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

#194

Post by SourPatch »

andjd wrote: post #68

Author complains about bad writing and includes the following error before the fold: `her decision to not include an piece` Pointing this out for the irony, not to denigrate what the author has to say.

I've been seeing this a lot online in the past few years and it has been driving me crazy. Has the a/an rule of writing been updated? I'm talking about examples like the one above, not stuff like "an historic."

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

#195

Post by colincooke »

8ytecoder wrote: post #47

A lot of publications have gone really bad in just the last few years. Back home we learnt English from newspapers. My English would be terrible if I attempt it now. British publications FT and The Economist still hold their standards high. They both have quality, well-researched content with commendable language to back it up.

The Economist (which I'm very familiar with) to me should be a model of how newspapers should operate. Make their biases up-front and clear (The Economist is written for and by believers in liberalism) but then report the facts well and clearly. It does help that they manage to tie in some nice british humour to make articles engaging.

I think it also helps that it is a weekly publication, which regularizes the sensationalist events of the day.

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

#197

Post by matthewowen »

8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote: post #74
aerovistae wrote: post #35

> 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…

So I don't know anything about this app really or its evaluations but I think applying it to acclaimed fiction is not a criticism of applying it to a newspaper article per se. News articles are meant to convey concrete information relatively concisely. So metrics like sentence length and complexity and adverb count are at least in theory valid things for it to measure and aim to reduce. Now whether it effectively mea…

This isn't a news article: it's a column, written by someone who's explicit remit is columns about the media industry.

It absolutely conforms to different rules than a news article on page A1.

I mean, I think it's bad writing too! But it'd be bad writing if it were in something like the New Yorker, too.

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

#198

Post by watwut »

keiferski wrote: post #24

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-cent…

It is funny, because I read journalists complaining about exactly opposite. Journalism used to be a place where local non-elite people went. It did not required special education, but became more elite over time.

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

#199

Post by ghaff »

tim333 wrote: post #185
alisonkisk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is what you meant that it is suspect to have passive voice being used as a heuristic?

The article mentions "8 use of passive voice" in the app's report.

All these types of apps do that, sometimes with a recommended max guideline. It's not a terrible heuristic like "Never use passive voice" is. Over some threshold, there's probably too much of it.

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

#200

Post by ycombinete »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #3

Newspapers have been laying off copy editors right and left in recent years. A reduction in the quality and clarity of writing is an obvious and predictable outcome. https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-... https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...

My wife is an editor, and she’s finding more and more jobs titled things like “editor”, “editorial consultant”, “copy writer/editor”. Where the roles of editor and copywriter are conflated. So I think there’s a case as well where you have people who should be copy writers doing editing, as well as a dearth of copywriters.
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