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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?

#291

Post by yesenadam »

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…

Wow, what an awesome article. Thank you!

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

#292

Post by pas »

oehpr wrote: post #285
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 anyt…

Since everything is now observed/broadcasted/published in real-time, every development of any current event is BREAKING NEWS.

But even if not breaking, certainly important.

This boils down the current style of giving a long-form article (story!) to every new piece of information.

And then to top it off sometimes a random smattering of these tidbits and factoids get crumpled together into a ball of front page articles, with "amazing production value". Big 4K pictures, a 3-4 paragraph intro, a personal touch, namedroppings.

What's missing is "obviously" what social science is supposedly about. Models, hypotheses, data, and picking the best one. Sure, articles provide this in a very crude form, via stories, appeals to some authority (when they cite/interview a random Professor of X at University of Y, who of course happens to be the Random Dude Z Chair), sometimes there are even a few graphs too!

However, it seems the main function of established media these days is to try to follow what's going on in the world and establish a record, ask questions, try to look/peer into the nasty machine of contemporary politics and power, scratch the surface, kick the tires, and so on. They are not really here to interpret and explain it.

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

#293

Post by yesenadam »

inglor_cz wrote: post #278
tomcam wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your written English is superb. It's indistinguishable from that of a literate native speaker.

Glad to hear that, thank you! Slavs in general tend to struggle with "a/an/the" in English, because most Slavic languages lack articles. Out of the entire language family, only Bulgarian uses definite articles. Articles feel unnatural to me, too. I got used to them, but in a similar way that one gets used to a prosthetic arm: you can do things, but it feels mechanic and distant.

> it feels mechanic and distant.

Just like the passive voice, then?

*mechanical

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

#294

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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.

As redler noted, you don't want "instead of," but depending on circumstance you might want "in addition to" -- although I think you're stacking the deck a little with your choice. :)

Also, you can invert that -- the story that seems to be about something relatively inconsequential can be a lens on more complex issues. Emily VanDerWerff at Vox is (at least to me) excellent at talking about society, culture and politics by talking about film and television.

To be clear, I don't want everything to sound like new journalism feature pieces, either, and I'm aware we're veering afield from the linked article's complaints. (I don't think I'm fully on board with that article's kvetching, but Ben Smith is definitely no Gay Talese.)

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

#295

Post by voldacar »

grawprog wrote: post #235

My main problem with most journalism today is the overuse of loaded adjectives specifically, but loaded language in general. It's rare to find a news story at all these days that reports something as 'X happened on this day. A and B parties were involved. Y was the consequence of X.' Instead news.is always reported more like. '&adjective, &adjective X was the most &loaded_descriptor event ever. The &negative_adjectiv…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_conjugation is a great skill to develop in the context of reading any media

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

#296

Post by ncmncm »

> 8 use of passive voice

"Uses", presumably. But the quoted bits had exactly one. Either the writer or the software doesn't know what passive voice is (or both!) or he is holding back the other seven.

This style of writing seems very deliberate. I doubt it was not intended to be just this way.

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

#297

Post by jdkee »

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.

This will certainly fit your bill.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

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

#298

Post by ncmncm »

rsynnott wrote: post #91
duckerude wrote: post #10

I fed the first tech article I could find on NYT's front page ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/technology/silicon-valley... ) into Hemingway: - Grade 12 (aim for 9) - 14 adverbs - 4 uses of passive voice - 7 phrases have simpler alternatives - 14 of 72 sentences are hard to read - 30 of 72 sentences are very hard to read That's very close to the score of the 2010 article, the biggest difference is the lower numbe…

> 4 uses of passive voice Use of passive voice is and always has been pretty common in journalism; I'd wonder if this Hemingway thing is actually an appropriate tool for evaluating journalism, just based on that.

Most people who think they know have, in fact, no idea what "passive voice" means. (E.B. White, of Strunk & White, e.g., certainly didn't.) Things they claim are aren't. Very likely, the tool doesn't either; if it gave the right answer, people would insist it was wrong.

Whenever I find a stray copy of S&W, I throw it away. I have tossed a bunch. Everything in it is either trivial or wrong. The trivial parts wouldn't make a book, so White added lots of wrong.

After his teacher, Strunk, died, White made up a bunch more fake rules, and then went back and doctored Strunk's text to obey them. But he didn't even notice he was violating them in his own text.

For the detailed rundown, search "nasty book pullum strunk".

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

#299

Post by pnt12 »

cuillevel3 wrote: post #139
kyle_martin1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Centralized media equals a controlled narrative. Gone are the days of investigating prestige and bi-partisan reporting. Maybe it never really existing though... It's clear that the majority of reporters lean center to far left politically. When it comes to topics that will make their "side" look bad, there's usually a lack of intellectual curiosity for the truth. This happens on both sides, of course, but th…

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

Dumb rule of thumb but it works: if something has "truth" in its name, it's unscientific right wing propaganda.

Of course this does not apply all the time, and you should evaluate the content and make a proper judgment. But I see this pattern way too often, that those who want to push some point will just invoke "the Truth" to give it more impact - after all, who can deny the truth?

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

#300

Post by dkn775 »

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?

It does in my experience, I work for a gov public safety agency and the numbers they show you are one part of the story. In public policy we learned how you determine what the thresholds are (When does good become excellent?), as well as things like what does improvement mean (a ten percent decrease in raw number? ten percent decrease from last years average?) mean that the framing of metrics must always be examined. Not to mention the litany of inside baseball stuff regarding how various things like 911 calls, car crashes, crimes, and population figures are captured, analyzed, and understood.

Outside of numbers. The same logic applies to fact checking sites which is why I always question why so many people use them to refute arguements. The authors decided what was deemed a good source.

A dirty secret I’ve noticed of the most controversial issues at the end of the day can be argued successfully both ways, so the fact checkers effectively choose the side they agree with. For example, should Texas be demonized for removing their mask mandates? Lot of areas in Texas are very remote. Texas is more insular of a state than say New Jersey. Federalism and US legal history typically affords states the latitude to make decisions for themselves based on their populations desires. To what extent does interstate commerce (flying out of Texas for example) justify outside/Federal force to upend Texas sovereignty? Lot of people try to argue Texas is just wrong but it’s deeper than that.

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