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-century ago, whereas today they almost certainly avoid it. I can't name a single person that I'd consider the modern equivalent of Lapham, or even Christopher Hitchens.
In some sense, journalism used to be a popular career choice for upper class kids with a deep interest in literature. Today, it seems more like an ideological battleground than a search for truth.
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 writer hired off some freelance platform.
There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Journalists have always chafed at limitations of space, but they are under even more pressure today to be concise and eschew subtleties and nuance. The same length as a traditional magazine article from a couple of decades ago, is now seen as a "long read", something for only a niche audience.
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.
One of the big problems at the moment in news media is that a tiny number of papers have _so much more prestige_ than their competitors that its sucked the oxygen out of the industry: instead of (eg) Philadelphians reading the Inquirer, they read the Times, and so the Times can grow, and it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
This is pretty bad for local news, which is bad because there are a lot of local issues in the US! It's important to have good newspapers in (eg) North Dakota because the state has a lot of power.
It's also kinda ironic that you mentioned this on a thread about this article, because the author in question is the child of writers/academics/judges/lawyers, educated privately on the UWS, graduated summa cum laude from Yale where we wrote for "prestige" magazines, and then built his career through a bunch of lower prestige publications. He's an exact poster child for the NYTimes being near the top of the prestige chain!
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. Consistently fascinating.
Aside: Oh Hitchens! There'l never be another like him. Every time I go back and read him, I get another take on the man and his messages; all not short enough, I'm afraid.
Each revision tends to oscillate wildly for me. I loathe him and I love him, rarely not at the same time.
Death, the artist, very slow; but you've heard that before.
His nom de guerre (l'auteur?) still rings true: A drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Rest well.
One issue is that most deep thinkers who challenge the neoliberal, corporate order have been ostracized to dissident status: Ralph Nader, Chomsky, and Chris Hedges come to mind.
There's no modern Lapham because we don't "need" (quotes because I actually think we have a big problem here) one anymore. Lapham's role was as a representative of the learned readership at the institution. These days, we're our own representatives. It is quite trivial for me to curate a list of extremely interesting individuals who publish writing or podcasts or lectures or whatever.
Now, the reason I quoted "need" above, what I think is a huge problem with the world today, is that by democratizing production we've done the opposite with consumption. It's super difficult to access high-quality information these days unless you're already fairly well educated and have the tools to filter the noise. I don't really know what to do about this.
For erudite articles on everything from Tang Dynasty poetry to the international ransom insurance market, I recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Or, in general, any of the book reviews. They give assignments to gifted scholars and writers who take the books they "review" as starting points to go deep into all sorts of topics.
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.
I'm not familiar with Lapham, but I'd consider many current New Yorker writers to be writing consistently interesting articles. Same with someone like Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books.
Newspapers 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.
> 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, and is widely taught in American high schools.) The excerpts I pasted were almost universally painted red: bad writing, "very hard to read."
Then I took excerpts of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over.
Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator -- red and yellow all over.
Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original Winnie the Pooh books. Finally, something it was mostly okay with! But only the dialogue. Anytime the author dared to write any description, red all over.
Seriously, don't use this tool.
Edited perspective from comment replies to mine: the app is largely okay with Hemingway, which makes sense as its main intent is to make your writing like Hemingway's. Also, if it is largely intended to be for business writing, then it makes sense that it would react poorly to literary writing. Both good points!
>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.
I have the same problem when talking politics with my father, or other people who follow the scene very closely. Instead of saying "the prime minister" or "the minister of education", they will use their names. Sometimes even for mayors or people who may have appeared on TV (which I don't watch) once.
Like the author I feel exhausted and always have to ask who's who and why is that important. Of course one option is to get interested in politics, but already being very bad with names and faces I feel like it's a waste of time.
I always thought the once a week Sunday paper format was a blessing in disguise. It forced writers to sum up the week in a way that anyone could pick up and understand.
If you go to nytimes.com right now, there are a bunch of stories which are clearly in medias res. It feels like jumping into the 5th episode of a Netflix series.
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 anything, and when I do understand it, I'm appalled at what is being shown.
To this day I scratch my head at how people can think watching prime time news or reading the newspaper is how you stay informed about the goings on of a society. And I'm not saying I have a better understanding of such, I don't. I just can't see how that information could be coming from the sources I'm told provide it.
This is what happens when you spend decades demonizing journalism. Instead of giving us insightful articles, the New York times is competing against Facebook and Twitter to grab your attention immediately. I have a feeling most people don't read an entire New York times article, the entire point is just to create headlines you can share on Facebook or Twitter, keep those clicks and kpis flowing!
In a way this is fantastic, we shouldn't have two or three newspaper owners running almost all media under the vestedge of prestige.
'Demonizing journalism' and having to adapt content in the wake of Facebook and Twitter are two separate things.
Mainstream journalism has been maligned for centuries (muckraking, yellow journalism, etc) and it seems to me that the main driver changing journalism today is the social media landscape. I just don't see the connection between demonizing newspapers and the change in how they write.
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 the frequency and instances are much greater on the left-leaning reporting.
No matter what you believe in, the publisher should be honest about their viewpoint instead of pretending they are not biased. Ben Shapiro is a good example of this. You know who he is and he clearly lays out the framework of evaluation. If you know where someone is coming from, you can then properly evaluate their points at a rational level rather than an emotional level.
Wonder if one wrote articles that contradict themselves (conclusion contradicts the initial thesis) how many people would have read to the end to discover that the end invalidates the initial idea.
Who exactly forced the NYT to support the Bush administrations preposterous claims about WMD?
If journalists want to be lionized instead of demonized they should perhaps stand up to power, and not only when their friends don't like the people in power.
News is dying because they whored themselves out decades ago. Facebook and google are excuses for the final stages of the decline, but they weren't there in the 90s when quality started to slide and papers were being bought out.
What is most jarring is reading about a given topic in a paper like NYT. You will start to have all sorts of deja vu before you realize that they sometimes self plagiarize entire paragraphs to fill in the meat of these articles. Then it becomes apparent the entire piece was written by someone stressed out who must have had 10 minutes to put it out.
I want news to return to the local level. Local news I am willing to pay for, because the information, and thus confidence in it, is closer to home and more identifiable.
Reminds me of a book by John Grisham{1} about a young journalist who buys a small southern newspaper, and turns it around by focusing on actual news.
Not exactly sure what you mean by "decades demonizing journalism"? Who is doing the demonizing? Decades?
Paper journalism's death has been exacerbated by the Internet, but it was dying long before the WWW was a thing. Radio, cinema, and television all played a role in killing off paper journalism. At the height of their popularity newspapers weren't just a method of conveying cold hard facts, they were a form of entertainment. It's not surprising that the least visually engaging medium is dying off when there are dozens of other more visually, and in turn emotionally engaging mediums, competing for eyeballs.
Imagine 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.
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 paragraph has to support the thesis.), writing it mostly meant plugging in key words in the template like a mad-lib. And it really messed up my writing for a while.
When trying to convey nuanced topics, I often feel like a Neanderthal (no offense I guess?) trying to bang adjectives together hoping for meaning to appear. I think a lot of the stuff I was taught about composition and sentence structures was worse than not learning anything. And I wish I could go back and learn from an actual writer instead of a teacher.
I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill".
I've found editing, not writing, to have gone right down the drain in modern newspapers. It's clear many stories are poorly edited if at all.
I don't want to be That Guy, but I've also noted a huge increase in terrible, incredible examples of the need for the Serial Comma, all by clueless editors. One big one was last week in the WP:
> Jackson’s former colleagues vastly disapproved of his conduct and leadership within the White House Medical Unit, including screaming, belittling colleagues and fits of rage, which demoralized nurses and doctors, the report found.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/03/03/...)
So what we've learned is that Jackson's conduct and leadership somehow included rounding up colleagues who screamed and belittled. And the presence of these horrible colleagues, plus his fits of rage, demoralized nurses and doctors...
I usually try and stay out of threads about publishing because I work in the industry and most of them are heated or incredibly vitriolic. (I'm employed in the industry as a software developer, not a journalist)
But this time I'm a little amused.
There's a lot of in-depth commentary by non-journalists about journalism. When non-software engineers comment about software development, or non-physicists comment about physical science there's usually much more ire for the lack of accuracy. And further, Substack (is that what's used instead of Medium now?) always seems to be posted with some kind of critique of every other journalistic outlet or platform. I guess that's how the new outlets get started now: react or rebel against something else? It worked for Canadaland and they've grown into their own so maybe it'll run a good course.
But I think the article isn't good. Why make such a sweeping statement when you're really only assessing an article or two in one or two publications?
Why treat all writing in a given publication as a common sum? They are editorialized and curated, but certainly not monolithic.
It's so dismissive and hand-wavy that I can hardly believe it's ranked this highly on HN and I must only assume it's because everyone everywhere seems to love to pile on a few things these days, and they always end up popular: how "bad" modern journalism is, how much artists should be paid (usually nothing), and any even remotely politically-charged subject. And each time, the story or the comments seem to be empty of compassion or even base-level empathy and understanding.
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.
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.)
Just because you don't like a piece of writing does not mean the writing is bad.
> I have so many questions.
> Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication?
> Something like this would be more clear:
It's also more boring. There are people who like things to be a bit more entangled, as real life often is, and that's what that writing caters for.
--
People like this guy who seem to be believe there's only one correct way to write, who actually believe you can put writing that is supposed to be pushing the envelope into "an app that identifies poor writing" and use the results piss me off. Grammarly and similar have their uses of course, but I dread the day people actually use it to clamp down on anything that's slightly different than the norm (as this guy is doing), and everyone will be forced to write in a style that conforms with what an ML model says is okay. It is my personal nightmare.
I 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.
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".
Have you ever noticed how the general mood of newspapers (at least in the New York Times and the Washington Post) is a feeling of despair? This is easily noticeable when looking at the photography [0]. You can pick up a Sunday copy of the NYT, or even open up the NYT's twitter, scroll around, and observe how many stories' lead image is of someone looking off with a kind of gloomy gaze in their eye. I assume years of data analytics and testing has proven this formula will consistently get clicks.
Newspapers used to have copy editors, people whose only job was to make sure that the kinds of mistakes the article refers to didn't get into print. Now they usually don't. That's why writing in newspapers got so bad.
This is the key insight. If you want not insta-news but deep, correct, insightful information, you should read publications that still employ multiple copy editors.
I for one work with a bunch of newspapers where these roles are still highly respected today; their presence alone explains why the output quality is much much better than their competition's, all other things being equal.
Typically, these people are authorized to edit any content needed without necessarily getting the writer's approval (it's baked into the writer's contract). They catch typos and fix grammatical errors, of course, but they will also check every single sentence multiple times for inaccuracies. They phone third parties, check that every word used is the correct one, make sure dates and events are exact, check arguments for syllogisms, fight with the author at times for the use of a particular word or expression in lieu of another, and so on so forth.
No matter how senior and respected, the journalists always approach these people with fear and awe when they get quizzed about their articles. Any approximation results in either the whole sentence getting axed or the author being forced to rewrite and resubmit (on their dime).
If you read how most major newspapers used to write about drugs, particularly cannabis, then you learn they have always been bad, manipulative and sleazy. They have to keep certain line of reporting to keep their licenses, but also money flowing in from interested parties, e.g. pharmaceutical industry. I don't believe there is one trustworthy outlet - it's all politics and corruption so best is read as much sources as you can on a topic that interests you and find truth yourself.
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 read The New Yorker.
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.
[+] [-] keiferski|5 years ago|reply
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-century ago, whereas today they almost certainly avoid it. I can't name a single person that I'd consider the modern equivalent of Lapham, or even Christopher Hitchens.
In some sense, journalism used to be a popular career choice for upper class kids with a deep interest in literature. Today, it seems more like an ideological battleground than a search for truth.
[1] I really recommend his magazine, Lapham's Quarterly and its podcast, The World in Time. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/world-in-time
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|5 years ago|reply
There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Journalists have always chafed at limitations of space, but they are under even more pressure today to be concise and eschew subtleties and nuance. The same length as a traditional magazine article from a couple of decades ago, is now seen as a "long read", something for only a niche audience.
[+] [-] busterarm|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matthewowen|5 years ago|reply
One of the big problems at the moment in news media is that a tiny number of papers have _so much more prestige_ than their competitors that its sucked the oxygen out of the industry: instead of (eg) Philadelphians reading the Inquirer, they read the Times, and so the Times can grow, and it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
This is pretty bad for local news, which is bad because there are a lot of local issues in the US! It's important to have good newspapers in (eg) North Dakota because the state has a lot of power.
It's also kinda ironic that you mentioned this on a thread about this article, because the author in question is the child of writers/academics/judges/lawyers, educated privately on the UWS, graduated summa cum laude from Yale where we wrote for "prestige" magazines, and then built his career through a bunch of lower prestige publications. He's an exact poster child for the NYTimes being near the top of the prestige chain!
[+] [-] sdenton4|5 years ago|reply
'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. Consistently fascinating.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510324/rough-translation
[+] [-] jimbokun|5 years ago|reply
If this person exists today, they are much more likely to be found on Substack than at The New York Times.
[+] [-] Balgair|5 years ago|reply
Each revision tends to oscillate wildly for me. I loathe him and I love him, rarely not at the same time.
Death, the artist, very slow; but you've heard that before.
His nom de guerre (l'auteur?) still rings true: A drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Rest well.
[+] [-] doggodaddo78|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idolaspecus|5 years ago|reply
Now, the reason I quoted "need" above, what I think is a huge problem with the world today, is that by democratizing production we've done the opposite with consumption. It's super difficult to access high-quality information these days unless you're already fairly well educated and have the tools to filter the noise. I don't really know what to do about this.
[+] [-] pradn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johncena33|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxqoz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelhoffman|5 years ago|reply
https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-...
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...
[+] [-] aerovistae|5 years ago|reply
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, and is widely taught in American high schools.) The excerpts I pasted were almost universally painted red: bad writing, "very hard to read."
Then I took excerpts of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, another celebrated English-language short story in a very different writing style. Red and yellow all over.
Knowing full well what it would think of James Joyce, I skipped over him to try Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator -- red and yellow all over.
Lastly, for the sake of variety, I decided to try something simple and put in large swaths of one of the original Winnie the Pooh books. Finally, something it was mostly okay with! But only the dialogue. Anytime the author dared to write any description, red all over.
Seriously, don't use this tool.
Edited perspective from comment replies to mine: the app is largely okay with Hemingway, which makes sense as its main intent is to make your writing like Hemingway's. Also, if it is largely intended to be for business writing, then it makes sense that it would react poorly to literary writing. Both good points!
[+] [-] gambler|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yoz-y|5 years ago|reply
Like the author I feel exhausted and always have to ask who's who and why is that important. Of course one option is to get interested in politics, but already being very bad with names and faces I feel like it's a waste of time.
[+] [-] keiferski|5 years ago|reply
If you go to nytimes.com right now, there are a bunch of stories which are clearly in medias res. It feels like jumping into the 5th episode of a Netflix series.
[+] [-] oehpr|5 years ago|reply
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 anything, and when I do understand it, I'm appalled at what is being shown.
To this day I scratch my head at how people can think watching prime time news or reading the newspaper is how you stay informed about the goings on of a society. And I'm not saying I have a better understanding of such, I don't. I just can't see how that information could be coming from the sources I'm told provide it.
[+] [-] offtop5|5 years ago|reply
In a way this is fantastic, we shouldn't have two or three newspaper owners running almost all media under the vestedge of prestige.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
Mainstream journalism has been maligned for centuries (muckraking, yellow journalism, etc) and it seems to me that the main driver changing journalism today is the social media landscape. I just don't see the connection between demonizing newspapers and the change in how they write.
[+] [-] kyle_martin1|5 years ago|reply
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 the frequency and instances are much greater on the left-leaning reporting.
There's daily examples of where political narratives override digging in the truth. Project Veritas covers a lot examples of this: https://www.projectveritas.com/search/videos/?query=new%20yo...
No matter what you believe in, the publisher should be honest about their viewpoint instead of pretending they are not biased. Ben Shapiro is a good example of this. You know who he is and he clearly lays out the framework of evaluation. If you know where someone is coming from, you can then properly evaluate their points at a rational level rather than an emotional level.
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konjin|5 years ago|reply
If journalists want to be lionized instead of demonized they should perhaps stand up to power, and not only when their friends don't like the people in power.
News is dying because they whored themselves out decades ago. Facebook and google are excuses for the final stages of the decline, but they weren't there in the 90s when quality started to slide and papers were being bought out.
[+] [-] asdff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underseacables|5 years ago|reply
Reminds me of a book by John Grisham{1} about a young journalist who buys a small southern newspaper, and turns it around by focusing on actual news.
{1}. The Last Juror
[+] [-] reedjosh|5 years ago|reply
I like https://substack.com/, but there are plenty of other like sources available.
[+] [-] zozin|5 years ago|reply
Paper journalism's death has been exacerbated by the Internet, but it was dying long before the WWW was a thing. Radio, cinema, and television all played a role in killing off paper journalism. At the height of their popularity newspapers weren't just a method of conveying cold hard facts, they were a form of entertainment. It's not surprising that the least visually engaging medium is dying off when there are dozens of other more visually, and in turn emotionally engaging mediums, competing for eyeballs.
[+] [-] symlinkk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadlavi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] legitster|5 years ago|reply
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 paragraph has to support the thesis.), writing it mostly meant plugging in key words in the template like a mad-lib. And it really messed up my writing for a while.
When trying to convey nuanced topics, I often feel like a Neanderthal (no offense I guess?) trying to bang adjectives together hoping for meaning to appear. I think a lot of the stuff I was taught about composition and sentence structures was worse than not learning anything. And I wish I could go back and learn from an actual writer instead of a teacher.
I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill".
[+] [-] SeanLuke|5 years ago|reply
I don't want to be That Guy, but I've also noted a huge increase in terrible, incredible examples of the need for the Serial Comma, all by clueless editors. One big one was last week in the WP:
> Jackson’s former colleagues vastly disapproved of his conduct and leadership within the White House Medical Unit, including screaming, belittling colleagues and fits of rage, which demoralized nurses and doctors, the report found. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/03/03/...)
So what we've learned is that Jackson's conduct and leadership somehow included rounding up colleagues who screamed and belittled. And the presence of these horrible colleagues, plus his fits of rage, demoralized nurses and doctors...
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|5 years ago|reply
But this time I'm a little amused.
There's a lot of in-depth commentary by non-journalists about journalism. When non-software engineers comment about software development, or non-physicists comment about physical science there's usually much more ire for the lack of accuracy. And further, Substack (is that what's used instead of Medium now?) always seems to be posted with some kind of critique of every other journalistic outlet or platform. I guess that's how the new outlets get started now: react or rebel against something else? It worked for Canadaland and they've grown into their own so maybe it'll run a good course.
But I think the article isn't good. Why make such a sweeping statement when you're really only assessing an article or two in one or two publications?
Why treat all writing in a given publication as a common sum? They are editorialized and curated, but certainly not monolithic.
It's so dismissive and hand-wavy that I can hardly believe it's ranked this highly on HN and I must only assume it's because everyone everywhere seems to love to pile on a few things these days, and they always end up popular: how "bad" modern journalism is, how much artists should be paid (usually nothing), and any even remotely politically-charged subject. And each time, the story or the comments seem to be empty of compassion or even base-level empathy and understanding.
But I digress...
[+] [-] xiii1408|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duckerude|5 years ago|reply
- 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.)
[+] [-] Nimitz14|5 years ago|reply
> I have so many questions. > Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication?
> Something like this would be more clear:
It's also more boring. There are people who like things to be a bit more entangled, as real life often is, and that's what that writing caters for.
--
People like this guy who seem to be believe there's only one correct way to write, who actually believe you can put writing that is supposed to be pushing the envelope into "an app that identifies poor writing" and use the results piss me off. Grammarly and similar have their uses of course, but I dread the day people actually use it to clamp down on anything that's slightly different than the norm (as this guy is doing), and everyone will be forced to write in a style that conforms with what an ML model says is okay. It is my personal nightmare.
[+] [-] vikbytes|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bww|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TrispusAttucks|5 years ago|reply
There is solipsistic change taking place in discourse were people assume you already have their knowledge in your head.
It's to the point where I have to play 24 question and then summarize the story to include all the facts to make sure I have it correct.
Totally possible I'm the strange one and see ambiguity where others do not.
[+] [-] berniemadoff69|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://twitter.com/nytimesGLOOM
[+] [-] relaxing|5 years ago|reply
https://news.gallup.com/poll/311228/national-mood-shows-litt...
[+] [-] not2b|5 years ago|reply
Edit: ninja'd.
[+] [-] vntok|5 years ago|reply
I for one work with a bunch of newspapers where these roles are still highly respected today; their presence alone explains why the output quality is much much better than their competition's, all other things being equal.
Typically, these people are authorized to edit any content needed without necessarily getting the writer's approval (it's baked into the writer's contract). They catch typos and fix grammatical errors, of course, but they will also check every single sentence multiple times for inaccuracies. They phone third parties, check that every word used is the correct one, make sure dates and events are exact, check arguments for syllogisms, fight with the author at times for the use of a particular word or expression in lieu of another, and so on so forth.
No matter how senior and respected, the journalists always approach these people with fear and awe when they get quizzed about their articles. Any approximation results in either the whole sentence getting axed or the author being forced to rewrite and resubmit (on their dime).
[+] [-] varispeed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbokun|5 years ago|reply
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/
[+] [-] keiferski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HDMI_Cable|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acwan93|5 years ago|reply
It comes across as pretentious, which may be what they're going for and what their target audience wants to feel when they read The New Yorker.
[+] [-] burntoutfire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertoandred|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underseacables|5 years ago|reply