Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

mleverything.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 307 posts

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

#221

Post by Veen »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #71
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…

> Seriously, don't use this tool. Horrible take. I use the tool for all of my blog posts. It’s a stellar tool with a couple of killer features. I 100% promise if you the tool it will improve the quality of your writing. That said, it does not identify “good writing” or “bad writing”. It is not sacrosanct. And it definitely can’t write for you. It’s perfectly valid to leave in yellow or red sentences. But the tool hel…

It’ll improve your writing if you’re a lazy, inattentive, careless writer. If you have any writing ability and pay attention to what you are doing, it’s worthless.

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

#222

Post by doggodaddo78 »

mancerayder wrote: post #56
LanceH wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Word quotas; gotta fill the columns.

Density: I make this mistake often. I end up chaining multiple thoughts rather than splitting them up into discrete sentences that link thoughts together. It maybe easier to write but it's harder to read.

I use commas for things that can be mentally skipped and lists, and semicolons for related sentence fragments. It's probably an anti-pattern to use semicolons except as a greater grouping like: do you want apples, pears, and bananas; chicken, fish, and beef; or lettuce, tomatoes, and onions?

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

#223

Post by ceautery »

There's a picture of the Drunken Canal newspaper at the top of the NYT article you're talking about, and the very text you nitpick mentions "the publication's unmarked white newspaper box" so saying it's unclear what Drunken Canal is doesn't hold water.

It's hard to assume good faith here.

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

#224

Post by doggodaddo78 »

LanceH wrote: post #28
mancerayder wrote: post #9

I 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.

Copy foreplay or word quotas?

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

#225

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Grim-444 wrote: post #161
cuillevel3 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says Project Veritas is a far right activists group, you could have honestly mentioned that.

They're a far right activist group according to the leftists who write that definition, yes. It's all so tiring, it's straight out of 1984. Isn't it interesting that you'll never once ever read the phrase "far left activist group"? Why does it only go one way?

> Isn't it interesting that you'll never once ever read the phrase "far left activist group"? Why does it only go one way?

I hear that phrase a lot, but then I'm probably more sensitive to that.

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

#226

Post by jasonkester »

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…

Indeed. When it first showed up here, I tried feeding some Hemingway to Hemingway.

It hated it.

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

#227

Post by Veen »

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’d love to see what the linked article’s writer thinks of Lewis Lapham’s prose. I suspect he’d be quite confused.

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

#228

Post by mc32 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #206
mc32 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, un…

I’m not saying it doesn’t have its place. I just don’t want it in hard news and related journalism.

Sinatra is not a hard news subject. That would belong in Playboy or RollingStone or New Yorker.

Imagine a WWII article about any of the mustachioed protagonists and it meandered about their choice of whisker trimming and lifestyle in mountain retreats and seaside dachas instead of all the horrors they caused.

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

#229

Post by cratermoon »

mrweasel wrote: post #191
cratermoon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, that sort of hyper-local stuff is virtually non-existent. Some cities have a paper that puts out neighborhood editions. Mine recently ran a series of stories about how the neighborhood association got audited and was found to be in terrible financial condition, so the city terminated their grants.

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

#230

Post by InitialLastName »

ketzo wrote: post #213
jimmaswell wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A measure that becomes a target often stops being a good measure.

Huh. This is actually quite insightful to me. I wonder if this applies more broadly? What from your own life makes you say that?

Not GP, but that's a formation of Goodhart's law [0], which comes up in a lot of situations.

Notable potential Goodhart's law situations:

- Testing in education

- GDP (or a number of other economic indicators) as a measure of economic performance/target for economic performance

- Healthcare outcomes along a number of axes

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Post reply on HN