Probably about the same time that they decided that being honest and making money couldn’t really go hand in hand anymore.
When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
11–20 of 307 posts
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#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 consuming news for several years. When I attempted to read NYT front page after that multi-year pause I couldn't understand a thing. All the titles and articles were referencing people and events I'm "supposed to" be familiar with.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#13Imagine if you were underpaid and overworked and your code that you stayed up until 3am writing went to production right away with no code reviews, and no one really cared because your code was sort of just filler to hold the space between ads.
EDIT: actually, even more dangerously: it's not just filler between ads, but also something that other people point to as a source of truth. Even though it was just cranked out by someone underpaid, overworked, and completely unedited/fact-checked.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#14If 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.
Perhaps not.
1) "Potential readers" is limited to people who can afford newspapers. NY Times runs around $520 per year in paper, at 2020 printing and delivery costs, and around $100 digitally. Printing and delivery costs, as portion of GDP-per-capita, were much higher in 1921. In 1921, the audience was extremely exclusive. An online audience is more democratic, and ergo, less educated.
2) Newspapers aren't driven by selling papers, so much as by organizational dynamics. I need to satisfy my boss and my peers to keep my job. Sales is one aspect of that, and as organizations grow in size, a decreasing aspect. As far as I can tell, NY Times has hired a bunch of idiots, and a lot of the most competent reporters are heading fast for the door.
Many companies which go under do so because of bad culture, often resulting from wildly misaligned incentives, good people leaving, bad people failing to bring in new good people, and so on. I think NY Times is slowly heading that way. I've seen few organizations able to claw back from where it is. Facebook and Google are moving in that direction too, for that matter.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#15While I agree with the main point, the specific criticisms author presented here made me even more confused than the NYT article he was criticizing. For example:
> The “though they’d like it if you’d follow them on Instagram” aside doesn’t even make any sense. What does big social media making community feel global have to do with soliciting likes on Instagram?
It means although The Drunken Canal was created as a reaction to giant online media, they (i.e. The Drunken Canal ) still use at least one such media (i.e. Instagram) themselves.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#16"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.
Agreed. Go here instead: https://substack.com/
That or any other non-ad funded media source.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#17There's a couple of things that I've thought about when it comes to this sort of thing (speaking as a journalist and someone who's taught journalism to college students).
- There's certainly an element where writers and audiences have an understanding about what they're writing about, and thus, you get stuff that's a bit more "inside baseball" that's a little harder to understand if you're not in the know. Like, jump from sports writing to economics to entertainment writing, and they all have their own quirks and tropes.
- Not necessarily the NYT, but my local paper has a lot of errors, and I know they don't have a copywriter on staff (they just advertised for one) — it's clear that their writers aren't catching stuff. I know this is a much bigger problem around the news world: copywriters are often the first to be culled during layoffs, and a good copywriter is a valuable resource.
- Writers are human, and we make mistakes. I know I work to read over everything out loud before turning it in to catch errors, but even then, I miss stuff. It happens, but you move on and try and correct mistakes that you're made aware of moving forward.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#18I 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…
Or maybe this Hemingway scoring is bunk.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#19This might be because the New Yorker (and other fancy newspapers) need to differentiate their writing from the very direct, straight to the point writing we see online nowadays. Instead of getting straight to the point, they meander on in an attempt to sound smarter.
Re: When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?
#20If 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.
Really? Isn't it more likely that the fincancial motive translates to quicker, scrappier & less polished articles.