When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
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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?
#2If we assume that newspapers goal is to sell papers to the maximum number of potential readers, this indicates a decline in general literacy / IQ of reading populace.
Compare and contrast the average newspaper article written in say 1921 compared to now. The difference in comprehension level is pretty glaring.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#3Newspapers have been laying off copy editors right and left in recent years. A reduction in the quality and clarity of writing is an obvious and predictable outcome.
https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-...
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#4If we assume that newspapers goal is to sell papers to the maximum number of potential readers, this indicates a decline in general literacy / IQ of reading populace. Compare and contrast the average newspaper article written in say 1921 compared to now. The difference in comprehension level is pretty glaring.
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Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#5I found this an interesting article at first glance but after comparing the two analyses he posted, are the numbers really that different that you can make a big distinction in terms of the articles differing readability? (If we accept that the program does a good job analyzing the text.)
Would be very interesting to see this kind of analysis with a decent sample size and see if there actually is a trend. Hard to tell by comparing just two articles.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#6"Journalism" isn't a real profession anymore. It doesn't attract writing talent, except at the margins. Why should it, journalism jobs have decreased by more than ~50% the last decade.
Journalists are now just copywriters; optimizing for SEO and Google's spiders.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#7When the money from ads and classifieds moved to the web...
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#8If we assume that newspapers goal is to sell papers to the maximum number of potential readers, this indicates a decline in general literacy / IQ of reading populace. Compare and contrast the average newspaper article written in say 1921 compared to now. The difference in comprehension level is pretty glaring.
> If we assume that newspapers goal is to sell papers to the maximum number of potential readers, this indicates a decline in general literacy / IQ of reading populace.
No doubt audiences are less well read today, but in theory this should motivate simpler, clearer writing, rather than the opaque, convoluted writing the article is (rightly) criticizing.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#9I 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 drive a narrative that the reader can relate to, and the New Yorker and the NY Times (since arguably they hire their writers with a recent academic background in a journalistic or literary discipline, often swimming in this style of writing, which dates from a particular elitist conception of writing you might find in Dialectic of Enlightenment or Adorno's works of cultural critique) like to make the reader work for it, since this perhaps contributes to the high literary feel of the paper.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#10I 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 number of adverbs. I'm guessing nothing has changed and there've always been outliers.
(This is one article, I don't read the NYT, and I can't comment on the subjective quality of the piece, so take this with a grain of salt.)