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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?

#281

Post by mahogany »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #242

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 phy…

It must be ranked highly just because of the clickbait headline and not the content. Because the content is vacuous. It's literally taking two cherry-picked articles a decade apart, pulling out a few bad and good lines, then feeding the articles into an app to assign and compare scores. I'm glad we have a robot to tell us what good writing is!

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

#282

Post by setr »

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…

I'm not sure overall-length would be affected by "short attention span" -- it would be "entertainment spikes" or I suppose "average time between significant events". Perhaps the best term is pacing -- how fast does the story flow?

You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this.

So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc.

From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits.

I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".

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

#283

Post by africanboy »

Barrin92 wrote: post #176
africanboy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not how it works though... you can't argue against numbers, you can absolutely argue against arbitrary numbers (like in this example the premise is that the app produces reliable results, which it does not and anyway it should be proved with good, hard to dispute, numbers)

OP's point is that all numbers are arbitrary (to varying degrees). The act of quantifying always imposes some sort of framework on what you're trying to look at, and we live in an age of pretty vulgar scientism where this is associated with 'objectivity'. From 'personality scores' for applicants, to social credit scores, and in this case the quality of writing in a newspaper.

and they are all non arbitrary (to varying degrees), but arguably some are objectively more arbitrary than others.

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

#284

Post by logifail »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #248
doggodaddo78 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's a term of art [..] "A newspaper of record is a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative."

One definition of "authoritative" would be "able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable"

I'm not sure how anyone could seriously believe that to be an appropriate way to describe the NYT (or indeed any of their major competitors).

To be blunt: they're "accurate" and/or "true", except for the all the times when they aren't.

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

#285

Post by oehpr »

gambler wrote: post #12

>I think a problem is that modern newspapers cater to an audience that’s expected to be very plugged in to the cultural and political topic of the day, or at least fake it. Spot on. The point of this style of writing isn't to provide you with information about new events. The point is to provide framing/spin for people who are already familiar (albeit uperficially) with occurring events. At some point I stopped consu…

I never got on board with the news because of this. I can listen or read and article about it and never seem to grasp exactly what is being said.

But! Whenever I see news agencies or publications write or talk about any subject on which I have a deep familiarity, all I see is either an idiotic mischaracterization of the facts, or blatantly manipulative spin.

Every time I don't understand a subject, I don't learn anything, and when I do understand it, I'm appalled at what is being shown.

To this day I scratch my head at how people can think watching prime time news or reading the newspaper is how you stay informed about the goings on of a society. And I'm not saying I have a better understanding of such, I don't. I just can't see how that information could be coming from the sources I'm told provide it.

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

#286

Post by slaymaker1907 »

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…

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5rB9jDbTPU yesterday which goes into details about problems with a similar service, Grammarly.

What Bee said really resonated with me. I used to be a stickler for grammar rules and "proper" English, but as I've progressed in life I've come to realize that those rules are all secondary. All that really matters is that you are understood in the way you want to be understood.

Grammar rules help educate people about common idioms and structures so that they can understand others and be understood themselves. Additionally, by following a certain set of grammatical conventions, you can change the way you are perceived. By ignoring the rules, one might be seen as erudite and sophisiticated. OTOH u dont always want to seem stuckup :)

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

#287

Post by ghaff »

com2kid wrote: post #261
ghaff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably true. I would have had to work to parse the first sentence in that article. The other thing going on is that, for many situations, the use of punctuation within long sentences to help the reader has sort of fallen out of fashion relative to breaking long sentences up. It's probably also more acceptable to use sentence fragments in certain types of prose.

> The other thing going on is that, for many situations, the use of punctuation within long sentences to help the reader has sort of fallen out of fashion relative to breaking long sentences up. Semicolons, colons, and dashes, are rarely used now days. Heck I am impressed when I see a dash properly used, I myself cannot lay claim to such knowledge. I am almost 100% certain that their usage was not taught to me in eit…

I use em dashes a fair bit (and have to remember the spacing style of the publication I'm writing for). But I'm much more inclined to break a sentence in two rather than use a semicolon unless there are two very connected thoughts.

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

#288

Post by kjrose »

This article demonstrates the Michael Scott Theory of Social Class:

https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...

In short, they write "posturetalk" over reporting news. This is why these articles are written this way. It is not to inform, it is to peacock.

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

#290

Post by forrestthewoods »

Veen wrote: post #221
forrestthewoods wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I bet you don’t use spell checkers or intellisense either

Feel free to read my blog. I used Hemingwayapp on almost every post. I’ll let you decide if I’m a lazy, inattentive, careless writer.

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/

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