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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?

#201

Post by coliveira »

coliveira wrote: post #106
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…

English is not my first language, so it astonishes me that some people really think that short sentences make good writing. Anyone can write bad prose using short sentences. Moreover, by writing in this way the language loses any kind of spice, so it's not a surprise that journalism and technical texts are so unpalatable. Another consequence is that even educated people never stop sounding like they're talking to a t…

But in a sense I realize why this is a problem in English: German an some latin languages have grammatical structure to make it easier to create and understand long phrases. English lacks much of that structure. So, long phrases are difficult to parse. Compare for example Proust novels written in English and in his French original. In English it is almost gibberish, even in good translations.

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

#202

Post by ghaff »

vharuck wrote: post #182
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just that journalism has become an ideological battleground. Even without the cultural warfare, once-mighty publications would still be seen as in decline. The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Due to the pressures of swiftly producing content that draws maximum clicks, journalists at even august publications are now forced to create articles little distinguishable from a minimum-wage content wr…

>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of co…

Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume.

I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.

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

#203

Post by twobitshifter »

My writing has become worse over the years. This is probably a lack of exercise, as I am primarily a consumer, but some of it may be caused by reading lower quality writing online. The NYTimes would not take the blame for my personal decline, but online content by others could be affecting its writers.

Hackernews wise, I have spent hours searching for a copy of the old UNIX writer’s workbench project, but haven’t found it anywhere. From what I’ve read these tools can do much more than the “Hemingway” tool used in the article.

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

#204

Post by hertzrat »

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…

Well said. It’s like people think they have to get the machine to validate them instead of the other way around. I was coaching somebody’s writing recently and trying to tell them not to modify their style based on Hemingway feedback, but they just had so much faith in it. Why would so many people use it if it wasn’t reliable, right?

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

#205

Post by matthewowen »

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…

I think you have this backwards.

One of the big problems at the moment in news media is that a tiny number of papers have _so much more prestige_ than their competitors that its sucked the oxygen out of the industry: instead of (eg) Philadelphians reading the Inquirer, they read the Times, and so the Times can grow, and it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

This is pretty bad for local news, which is bad because there are a lot of local issues in the US! It's important to have good newspapers in (eg) North Dakota because the state has a lot of power.

It's also kinda ironic that you mentioned this on a thread about this article, because the author in question is the child of writers/academics/judges/lawyers, educated privately on the UWS, graduated summa cum laude from Yale where we wrote for "prestige" magazines, and then built his career through a bunch of lower prestige publications. He's an exact poster child for the NYTimes being near the top of the prestige chain!

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

#206

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mc32 wrote: post #146
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just that journalism has become an ideological battleground. Even without the cultural warfare, once-mighty publications would still be seen as in decline. The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Due to the pressures of swiftly producing content that draws maximum clicks, journalists at even august publications are now forced to create articles little distinguishable from a minimum-wage content wr…

Some forms of long articles are a form of entertainment. They appeal to a segment of society that enjoys long winded and meandering reads. But those are different from long articles which pack a lot of content. Time magazine or Newsweek of yore. The latter didn’t pad the stories with flowery language or add “texture” (things like describing the sofa someone is sitting in and the drapery or wainscoting, etc., that per…

Long-form journalism has been written with an eye to "adding texture" for decades. Some of the most celebrated non-fiction writers of the last half-century—Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson—followed in that tradition.

"In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has...

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

#207

Post by sdenton4 »

8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote: post #128
sdenton4 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text had no special claims in truth, I'm afraid. And many of the best podcasters are in fact journalists. Greg Warner, Sarah Koenig, even Alex Blumberg...

That's not what I'm claiming at all. It's not about the medium it's about the structures, constraints, and goals of the work. I'm also not claiming that podcasting can't be journalism, just that the structures necessary for it to be aren't widespread or generally highly valued by podcasters as a group. Plenty of journalists do use it as their medium but that doesn't make podcasting and journalism the same thing.

And I never claimed that all podcasting is journalism...

Journalism is a subset of (text/audio), and some (writers/podcasters) care a lot more about journalistic standards than others.

I would argue that podcasting institutions - npr and affiliates, gimlet, radiotopia - actually do have a lot of understanding and respect for journalistic standards, and also represent a very large share of the most popular podcasts. I don't think the two media are as different in this regard as you seem to believe.

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

#208

Post by keiferski »

matthewowen wrote: post #205
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…

I think you have this backwards. One of the big problems at the moment in news media is that a tiny number of papers have _so much more prestige_ than their competitors that its sucked the oxygen out of the industry: instead of (eg) Philadelphians reading the Inquirer, they read the Times, and so the Times can grow, and it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is pretty bad for local news, which is bad because the…

When I say prestige, I mean among the population at large. The average person in America no longer looks at the Times as a prestigious organization. A few decades ago, they did.

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

#209

Post by doggodaddo78 »

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…

NYT: the paper of "record." Regardless of past or modern quality, it seems kind of arrogant for a promulgater of copy to proclaim they have undisputed monopolies on truth and facts, doesn't it?

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

#210

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

mudita wrote: post #96
sdenton4 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If that's true, then it's a real shame. I strongly prefer written text to podcasts. Maybe that's just my own taste, but to be honest, I believe, that it's just a much, much better medium for conveying ideas. With text I can process the content non-linearly. I can skim to get an overview. I can go back to previous passages and find them again easily even days later. I can take more time to reflect on difficult parts a…

I've tried to get into podcasts more times than I can count. I just can't get there. Besides the advantages you describe, I can "consume" the content SO much more quickly on a page than a podcast, even if I speed it up, which seriously degrades the medium anyway.
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