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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?

#91

Post by rsynnott »

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.

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

#93

Post by slowmovintarget »

AndrewLiptak wrote: post #17

There'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…

Do you think part of the lack of good copywriting is due to the private equity squeeze on local papers?

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

#94

Post by gxqoz »

underseacables wrote: post #25

Newspapers could be suffering from a race to the bottom in terms of hiring the cheapest (and probably less skilled) talent. With all of the financial woes compounded, hiring recent J-school graduates versus investing in those with more experience, may be showing the inexperience in print.

Is this really the case? My sense is that newspaper writing went from something of a working-class profession to one that requires extremely high credentials. Certainly the most elite publications like the New York Times are basically only hiring from the Ivy League.

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

#95

Post by akudha »

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…

Can anyone shed light on how it works? There is another one that comes to mind, PTE exam.

The PTE exam is fully computer graded (as far as I know), including written essay. I wonder how they do it. The algorithm has to account for topic relevance, grammatical errors, style, clarity etc etc. Topic relevance alone can be quite hard, isn't it? If the question is "What is your opinion on making voting mandatory? Support with examples", I can talk about voting and elections without actually giving an opinion. How does the algo detect it?

PTE, Hemingway app etc - really intriguing to reduce human language to logic and calculation.

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

#96

Post by mudita »

sdenton4 wrote: post #40
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 think much of the journalism of ideas is happening in podcasts now. Podcasts certainly more of a frontier right now, with lots of people (still!) trying out interesting things, compared to the shrinking world of print journalism. 'Rough Translation' with Gregory Warner is one of the best, imo. The idea of to take important stories in the US and find analogues in other countries, and look at how they've played out.…

If that's true, then it's a real shame. I strongly prefer written text to podcasts.

Maybe that's just my own taste, but to be honest, I believe, that it's just a much, much better medium for conveying ideas. With text I can process the content non-linearly. I can skim to get an overview. I can go back to previous passages and find them again easily even days later. I can take more time to reflect on difficult parts and less time for stuff I know already. I can quote sentences easily to share insights with friends...

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

#97

Post by teh_klev »

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 probably agree about the tool, each writer adds their own flourishes and richness to their prose to capture vividly in your mind a scene or emotion. Hemingway probably doesn't understand this.

But the reason he arrives at using it is because he rightly calls out a bunch of prose that is terrible writing and is trying to quantify this in some way. And whilst I have no problems reading long form articles, many these days do tend to suffer from confusing and downright tedious language.

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

#98

Post by busterarm »

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'd argue that slightly more than half a century ago, journalism was largely a blue-collar job with blue-collar attitudes done by working & middle-class people. They saw the job as their responsibility to hold public figures to public account.

The prestige journalists chased all of these people out and many of the factors that appealed to them are still there (getting a platform to push your views) but it turns out those appeal much more to ideologues than those who want to write well in a paper with others who write well.

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

#99

Post by rsynnott »

acwan93 wrote: post #31
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #19

This 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.

One thing that irks me about The New Yorker is their liberal use of diacritics. They've added umlauts to words with consecutive vowels like "cooperate" (coöperate) and "reelect" (reëelect), when it hasn't been a part of conventional American English (or any regional variant?) for quite some time. It comes across as pretentious, which may be what they're going for and what their target audience wants to feel when they…

As the New Yorker will tell you, rather grumpily, it's not an umlaut: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

> She [journalist] said that once, in the elevator, he [style editor] told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.

The lesson is, it seems, don't mess with the not-umlaut.

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

#100

Post by xiii1408 »

I expected this to be complaining about the loss of complex literary writing in favor of more simple, sensationalist style. It's not.

Basically, he pastes part of a New Yorker article in Hemingway, a tool that evaluates the reading level of a text and flags it if it's more complex than a ninth grade reading level. Spoiler: the New Yorker piece has too many big words and more complex sentences than what you'd write to target a ninth grade audience. He then does this for a longer New York Times think piece, also written in a New Yorker-like style.

What do you expect? These are not news articles, these are think pieces, even though one of them is published in the New York Times. They're supposed to be literary, which sometimes means having words more complex than a ninth grade level and sentences longer than what Hemingway would write.

If you tried this on an actual news article, where the style is often simpler, you might get a different result.

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