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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?

#241

Post by SkyBelow »

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…

Sounds like a set of training wheels. Helpful for those begging to learn, but extremely limiting if you don't learn to take them off once you have the basics. I can definitely see the benefit of such an application, but the risks are also quickly apparent. Looking at it from one level higher, I think I would be in favor of such an application because those who don't ever take the training wheels off will, on average, gain more than had they never had it while those who would be held back by it are likely to outgrow it on their own pace. The only real threat is if it becomes a tool of authority, like teachers that depend upon it and mark down writing that the app doesn't like.

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

#242

Post by 52-6F-62 »

I usually try and stay out of threads about publishing because I work in the industry and most of them are heated or incredibly vitriolic. (I'm employed in the industry as a software developer, not a journalist)

But this time I'm a little amused.

There's a lot of in-depth commentary by non-journalists about journalism. When non-software engineers comment about software development, or non-physicists comment about physical science there's usually much more ire for the lack of accuracy. And further, Substack (is that what's used instead of Medium now?) always seems to be posted with some kind of critique of every other journalistic outlet or platform. I guess that's how the new outlets get started now: react or rebel against something else? It worked for Canadaland and they've grown into their own so maybe it'll run a good course.

But I think the article isn't good. Why make such a sweeping statement when you're really only assessing an article or two in one or two publications?

Why treat all writing in a given publication as a common sum? They are editorialized and curated, but certainly not monolithic.

It's so dismissive and hand-wavy that I can hardly believe it's ranked this highly on HN and I must only assume it's because everyone everywhere seems to love to pile on a few things these days, and they always end up popular: how "bad" modern journalism is, how much artists should be paid (usually nothing), and any even remotely politically-charged subject. And each time, the story or the comments seem to be empty of compassion or even base-level empathy and understanding.

But I digress...

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

#243

Post by redler »

mc32 wrote: post #228
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Instead of" would certainly be bad. But the "textural details" of these long-form articles is the sort of experiential glue that can make the scene -- and the facts -- come alive in the mind of the reader. That makes them memorable and relatable, providing hooks to which the reader can attach their understanding. Like the difference between a getting-started guide and chapter one of a reference book -- they both have their place, but they're not the same thing.

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

#244

Post by inglor_cz »

kingofpandora wrote: post #165
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…

Any tool that uses passive voice as a heuristic for good versus bad writing is immediately suspect. And any writer who uses such a tool for validation is unlikely to be a good judge of writing to begin with.

Writer here, reasonably competent, because people pay me for writing (in Czech; forgive me my English errors).

Passive voice in narration is ... strange most of the time. It kicks the reader out of the situation, like Out-of-body experience, only it is an Out-of-book experience.

"John was killed by the assassins, his body was later discovered by a cleaning lady, carried out by morticians and dissected by pathologists."

It is pretty hard to feel any emotions around this almost technically cold description. A sentence like this could have come from a police dossier.

I am not a friend of software validation tools in this regard, though. Capturing the essence of beauty in words isn't a solved problem.

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

#246

Post by gkoberger »

I used to work for a well-known tech blog, and I kinda saw this happen in realtime.

It's all about speed. The way articles would work would be that they'd be posted immediately by the author, and edited after. Sometimes they wouldn't actually get edited (after all, it was already out there and the views were already trending downward after an hour). And at best, the editing would just be spelling and grammar rather than structural, because you can't change a live blog post that much.

So, the result was first drafts of articles were basically the final draft.

I always hated it, but I don't know what else can be done? Google and Twitter and others give a huge boost to the first one with the story, and there's no much reward for doing it right.

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

#247

Post by lliamander »

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…

Specifically, Hemingway was a journalist. His style is one I would expect to be a reasonable standard for newspapers in particular.

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

#248

Post by ternaryoperator »

doggodaddo78 wrote: post #209
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?

It's a term of art and doesn't have the meaning you attribute to it. Here's the definition from Wikipedia: "A newspaper of record is a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative."

When you consider NYC's other news dailies (the NY Post and the Daily News), it would be hard to disagree that the NYT is the most authoritative.

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

#249

Post by cafard »

Since the memory of [this] man runneth not to the contrary.

The Washington Post has for many years been well thought of. Back in the 1960s, Ben Bagdikian said that the problem with The Washington Post is that nobody edited it. Benjamin Bradlee hired him to do so, but he left after a couple of years. By the time I started reading the Post a few years later, I constantly ran into sloppy, badly edited writing.

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

#250

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

SeanLuke wrote: post #132

I've found editing, not writing, to have gone right down the drain in modern newspapers. It's clear many stories are poorly edited if at all. I don't want to be That Guy, but I've also noted a huge increase in terrible, incredible examples of the need for the Serial Comma, all by clueless editors. One big one was last week in the WP: > Jackson’s former colleagues vastly disapproved of his conduct and leadership withi…

Your example seems perfectly cromulent to me. Obviously an uncharitable reader could interpret it differently, but human language is inherently ambiguous and readers are used to determining how to read lists in context.
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