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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?

#141

Post by jschwartzi »

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…

The reading level is probably the best gauge for whether an average person will understand what you're saying. If it's reading level 14, that means post high school. Most people in the US graduate from high school with an 8th or 9th grade reading level. So a piece with a 14th-grade reading level will be completely beyond them.

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

#142

Post by ghaff »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #137
ghaff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many newspapers/magazines can get a critical mass of people to spend $100/year? The NYT, WSJ, Economist, maybe New Yorker?

What's a critical mass? You sell subscriptions and hire journalists in proportion to how many people subscribe. The "critical mass" to hire the first journalist is like 1000 people. Huge publications like that only exist because of the historical capital cost of a printing press. Using traditional numbers, e.g. a city of 500k people 10% of whom subscribe to the local outlet, you can fund ~50 full-time local journalis…

So how easy do you think it is for one journalist to produce content that 1000 people will pay $100/year for? (And that number is probably too low because you probably have significant marketing expenses if nothing else.)

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

#143

Post by macintux »

This bizarre construction popped up last week in an article about the New Zealand quakes:

> Only around one or fewer earthquakes of 8.0-magnitude or greater occur each year.

I imagine it’s hard to write cleanly and get copy editing when everything has to be online 15 minutes ago.

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

#144

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

Not only is the style bad. The journalists all seem to have a rather narrow and uniform political agenda now. I don't see any suspicion of large, centralized projects, the way they used to be suspicious of these things in the past. Its enough now it seems for a political group to declare that there is a particular purpose for a policy, and the policy is analyzed strictly from the perspective of its goals ... nobody seems to talk about tradeoffs and other possible outcomes in any great depth.

Which is tragic, given how failure prone almost every Federal grand program has been in the long run, from the war on drugs, to the war in Iraq, to housing subsidies, to subsidized student debt.

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

#145

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ghaff wrote: post #142
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a critical mass? You sell subscriptions and hire journalists in proportion to how many people subscribe. The "critical mass" to hire the first journalist is like 1000 people. Huge publications like that only exist because of the historical capital cost of a printing press. Using traditional numbers, e.g. a city of 500k people 10% of whom subscribe to the local outlet, you can fund ~50 full-time local journalis…

So how easy do you think it is for one journalist to produce content that 1000 people will pay $100/year for? (And that number is probably too low because you probably have significant marketing expenses if nothing else.)

I mean, there are a lot of people already doing it on Substack.

The common marketing mechanism seems to be to make many of the articles available to non-subscribers (or do this after a time delay), and then they get spread around on social media which acts as promotion for the author.

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

#146

Post by mc32 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #50
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…

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…

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 permeates a certain type of writing. That has its place, but not in journalism as much. Long journalism should add direct and proximate information not delve into atmospherics.

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

#147

Post by bww »

Summary: a blog about machine learning is criticizing the writing in a culture magazine for being too florid. His argument is that all writing, no matter the audience, should be written in a terse, declarative style at an 8th grade reading level.

He attempts to justify this ludicrous opinion by using "Hemingway", a presumably-ML-powered robot copy editor app, to prove that this magazine is "hard to read".

There, I saved you ten exasperating minutes.

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

#148

Post by johncena33 »

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…

I personally think it's post-modernism and the adjacent ideologies are responsible for this. Since everything is subjective and there's no objective notion of truth and it's all moral relativism, one has the license to do anything they want. That's why activism and ideologies took over professional integrity.

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

#149

Post by silvestrov »

legitster wrote: post #63

I write semi-professionally, and it amazes me how much you have to unlearn from your time in college, which required unlearning from your time in high school, which required unlearning from your time in grade school. I still remember a horrifying 2-page (gasp!) paper from 5th grade where the requirements where so stringent (The 5th sentence has to be a thesis statement! Start each paragraph with a transition. Each pa…

Bullet points (and tables) were also a taboo in high school, but can be very useful when communicating a list of choices.

High School also required a minimum length of essays, but when writing online to customers, you want to avoid long paragraphs.

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

#150

Post by minimaxir »

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…

It is somewhat ironic that a blog about machine learning cherry-picks results from a black-box model to prove a point.
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