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.
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.
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.
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.
Not only newspapers but even publishers of books. As a translator occasionally hired to translate works of literature, I do the best I can, but my manuscript still needs to go before a good proofreader and copyeditor to make everything just perfect before it is published. I have been dismayed at how now, publishers no longer use in-house staff but just hire an incompetent or lazy copywriter from the developing world off some freelancing platform. The same holds for typesetting. Sometimes the end result is worse than my original manuscript!
Sadly, publishers 1) are competing with e.g. books self-published on Amazon, and 2) noticed that the mass market consuming those Amazon self-published efforts seems pretty OK with content that is full of typos and bad-quality typesetting, so why even bother any more?
A medical provider I know had a medical assistant that would write charts that were next to illegible. Little to no punctuation or capitalization. Slang. etc... The provider invariably had to go back and rewrite the charts because they didn't want that associated with their name.
It's no wonder more and more people don't care about virtually unedited published content. In addition to not caring, often times they don't even know the difference.
Which begs the question for me: what is it they say we're getting with all these standardized tests and the singular focus on teaching kids to pass those tests again? Because it seems to me we're about to have a populace doesn't read and can't write.
It’s a vicious cycle with cost cutting removing these positions, leading to fewer people reading and relying on the paper, leading to more cost cutting.
I also think that there’s fewer pedants complaining in letters to the editor about these kinds of errors. And probably fewer editors paid to read any letters.
Finally, since any discussions I have with friends about the NYT turn into a tribal discussion, there’s a weird situation where people defend poor writing and editing because they are pro-NYT. So I tend to avoid, or at least not participate because they are so pointless and boring.
My wife is an editor, and she’s finding more and more jobs titled things like “editor”, “editorial consultant”, “copy writer/editor”. Where the roles of editor and copywriter are conflated. So I think there’s a case as well where you have people who should be copy writers doing editing, as well as a dearth of copywriters.
> The dirty little secret of newspaper journalists is that a lot of them can't write very well. That's by no means universally true, but it's true enough. [...] I transformed some real trash into publishable writing, saved my paper and some writers from professional embarrassment, and introduced relatively few errors on my own.
And from the comments:
> Having worked at small, mid and metro newspapers, I can tell you reporters who can't write very well exist everywhere. When I first started working at a major metro, I thought all of the raw copy would be flawless. After all, these reporters were working at a metro daily. But there were plenty of reporters who really needed the old rewrite desk. Some reporters, of course, were very good writers But pity the poor reader if copy editors disappear.
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.
"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.
Journalism is expensive, so what I think may be happening is that the newspapers are no longer able to afford to fill an entire paper with the writings of actual journalists. Instead they hire "writers" and "translators" who take junk from the internet and notices from news agencies and turn it into sort of articles.
Danish newspapers are filled with bad spelling and broken language. It's pretty clear that they're hiring people to translate or piece together articles.
The real investigating articles are still well written, but there aren't enough of those to fill the paper or update the website multiple times a day.
Newspapers used to be great for local news. But now with layoffs they barely cover the usual local beats. They fill lots of space with "local" news that is actually written off in some corporate center by a few people that do a few minutes of googling. https://newrepublic.com/article/160534/desperate-last-days-l...
You can’t actually get local news anymore. There was a fire at a nursing home just a few km from my house. Only “reporting” available the next day was via a Facebook group for the local area. The papers that are small enough to cover it no longer exists and it not worth covering in the larger papers.
True, that sort of hyper-local stuff is virtually non-existent. Some cities have a paper that puts out neighborhood editions. Mine recently ran a series of stories about how the neighborhood association got audited and was found to be in terrible financial condition, so the city terminated their grants.
It's true for core of reporting. Being able to write clearly and accurately is important, but if the reporter isn't able to actually do the legwork of actual reporting, the result is clearly-written but empty of information. Being able to re-write a press release from the mayor's office isn't journalism.
I 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.
It seems in the past 15 years there is a deliberate avoidance of the actual topic until deep into the article. I can only assume this hits some optimization for online use.
Density: I make this mistake often. I end up chaining multiple thoughts rather than splitting them up into discrete sentences that link thoughts together. It maybe easier to write but it's harder to read.
I use commas for things that can be mentally skipped and lists, and semicolons for related sentence fragments. It's probably an anti-pattern to use semicolons except as a greater grouping like: do you want apples, pears, and bananas; chicken, fish, and beef; or lettuce, tomatoes, and onions?
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.)
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.
Most people who think they know have, in fact, no idea what "passive voice" means. (E.B. White, of Strunk & White, e.g., certainly didn't.) Things they claim are aren't. Very likely, the tool doesn't either; if it gave the right answer, people would insist it was wrong.
Whenever I find a stray copy of S&W, I throw it away. I have tossed a bunch. Everything in it is either trivial or wrong. The trivial parts wouldn't make a book, so White added lots of wrong.
After his teacher, Strunk, died, White made up a bunch more fake rules, and then went back and doctored Strunk's text to obey them. But he didn't even notice he was violating them in his own text.
For the detailed rundown, search "nasty book pullum strunk".
The NYT has always targeted a higher reading level.
Through random circumstances I wound up reading the print edition of my city’s daily broadsheet
for a few months. The difference in writing style and structure was incredible — the local paper felt dumbed down in comparison. Going back to the Times was like a breath of fresh air. This was a couple decades ago.
>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 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.
People talk about "slow news". I'd like a weekly or monthly "current events" review more than news, except for major timely events like an election or natural disasters.
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 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.
Since everything is now observed/broadcasted/published in real-time, every development of any current event is BREAKING NEWS.
But even if not breaking, certainly important.
This boils down the current style of giving a long-form article (story!) to every new piece of information.
And then to top it off sometimes a random smattering of these tidbits and factoids get crumpled together into a ball of front page articles, with "amazing production value". Big 4K pictures, a 3-4 paragraph intro, a personal touch, namedroppings.
What's missing is "obviously" what social science is supposedly about. Models, hypotheses, data, and picking the best one. Sure, articles provide this in a very crude form, via stories, appeals to some authority (when they cite/interview a random Professor of X at University of Y, who of course happens to be the Random Dude Z Chair), sometimes there are even a few graphs too!
However, it seems the main function of established media these days is to try to follow what's going on in the world and establish a record, ask questions, try to look/peer into the nasty machine of contemporary politics and power, scratch the surface, kick the tires, and so on. They are not really here to interpret and explain it.
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.
More like: imagine if your code wasn't run on computers but written by hand, then it was rated by hn comments and finally the highest scoring comment was put into production which happened to be a fully automated pace maker used by millions.
While 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.
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 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.
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.
i really like the new yorker, but it is 100% pretentious and it seems like the people who read/collect the magazines always fall into a bucket of "look how smart and well read i am"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
This theory doesn't work because the decline has nothing to do with print. Look at where cable news is now -- it's somehow, seemingly impossibly, even worse than the NYT. It's as if CNN and MSNBC looked at Fox News and reacted with a jealously-based compulsion to outmatch their pathology.
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.
I don't think you're willing to pay what it would actually cost. Not calling you a liar, just noting that a truly local news source, operating at the level that they did 20 years ago, would cost so much more today.
The revenue for a local paper used to come primarily from advertising that doesn't exist anymore. Movie theater listings, classified ads, auto dealership sections. The Real Estate "section".
Each of those have been picked off by apps and websites. Craigslist, IMDB, Redfin/Zillow, etc.
And it's a spiral. With each reduction in circulation, the attractiveness for advertisers drops. Any attempt to make up the shortfall with higher subscription rates just accelerates the downfall.
So we get conglomerates that try to manage costs by being "local" in name only. They can't afford to employ reporters in every town with 75,000 residents. You instead get local papers that are just a reskin of a common wire feed. A few easy articles that could be GPT'd from the police blotter. Maybe a blogger or two.
I live in a fairly small town (7,000 people). A long time ago now, we had a sort of labor of love local paper that ended up shutting down. (The publisher fell ill.) The only remaining paper option was a "local" from one of the conglomerates. Pretty lousy overall and it mostly covered what was going on in a local small city and some bigger towns. Wouldn't have been worth subscribing to. Facebook and NextDoor is about the best I can do although even those aren't very active.
This is ignoring the traditional economics though.
Newspapers would charge for a subscription and sell advertising. The subscription fee would essentially just pay for printing and distribution of the physical newspaper, and then advertising provided the margin.
Now advertising is in the dumps but the internet has removed the capital and operating costs of a printing press and physically delivering dead tree pages to doorsteps.
Traditional newspaper subscriptions were something like $10/month. If you have 50,000 local subscribers and negligible printing costs, that's $6,000,000/year. You can fit a full staff of journalists into that budget.
Or you can go it alone, charge the same $10/month and be making $120,000/year with 1000 subscribers.
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 journalists. Which is the same whether they all work for one publication or they all work for themselves.
"Publications" will probably become subscription aggregators. So instead of 50,000 people each paying $10/month to one of 50 independent journalists such that they each have 1000 subscribers, all 50,000 people pay $10/month to the aggregator and then get access to the work of all 50 journalists.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some substack newsletters that make that kind of money, especially if people brought a large audience from elsewhere. I doubt many of them are covering local news which is what this sub-thread was about. Personally, I doubt I'd pay $100/year for a newsletter unless it were making me money or really delved into some niche topic of significant interest not well-covered elsewhere. But I'm glad if some people are making a living off it.
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.
They're a far right activist group according to the leftists who write that definition, yes. It's all so tiring, it's straight out of 1984. Isn't it interesting that you'll never once ever read the phrase "far left activist group"? Why does it only go one way?
Dumb rule of thumb but it works: if something has "truth" in its name, it's unscientific right wing propaganda.
Of course this does not apply all the time, and you should evaluate the content and make a proper judgment. But I see this pattern way too often, that those who want to push some point will just invoke "the Truth" to give it more impact - after all, who can deny the truth?
I'm hoping this is satire. Project Veritas is infamous for amateurish hitjobs and misleading editing that quite frankly only fools would fall for. Ben Shapiro is not a good example of pretending to not be biased. He'll conveniently forget to disclose that he's funded by fracking billionaires while dunking on environmentalists.
'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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I don't think you're wrong (I don't know enough), but it's quite the caricature of entrepreneur culture to say that podcasts are doing journalism better than the journalists.
NYT is one paper, from one city. The scope of print journalism is vast and probably defeats podcasts 100 to 1.
Many of the people doing the best work in podcasting are journalists, make no mistake! Many who either are currently or formerly were at NPR, rotating long time contributors to This American Life, etc.
For the most part, podcast reporting is closer to magazine reporting than newspapers. ('Democracy Now' is maybe the exception that proves the rule?) But given the survival rate of magazines at this point in history, it's obvious that podcasts are where you're going to see more innovation.
This ignores the fact that journalism is a professional discipline with established ethical practices that is practiced by groups of journalists and editors together.
Now there's definitely an argument to be made that it routinely fails to live up to those standards and that it has certain structural weaknesses and biases that need to be addressed.
But it is, overall, a system of professionals who consider their work to be constrained in certain ways that are ethically important to them and the world. Individual podcasters might adhere to some of these standards but as a field it has no aspirations to that. Same with journalists leaving established papers to publish on substack with no editorial oversight. They are not practicing journalism as journalists see the field.
These things might replace journalism but they aren't it.
Text had no special claims in truth, I'm afraid. And many of the best podcasters are in fact journalists. Greg Warner, Sarah Koenig, even Alex Blumberg...
That's not what I'm claiming at all. It's not about the medium it's about the structures, constraints, and goals of the work.
I'm also not claiming that podcasting can't be journalism, just that the structures necessary for it to be aren't widespread or generally highly valued by podcasters as a group. Plenty of journalists do use it as their medium but that doesn't make podcasting and journalism the same thing.
And I never claimed that all podcasting is journalism...
Journalism is a subset of (text/audio), and some (writers/podcasters) care a lot more about journalistic standards than others.
I would argue that podcasting institutions - npr and affiliates, gimlet, radiotopia - actually do have a lot of understanding and respect for journalistic standards, and also represent a very large share of the most popular podcasts. I don't think the two media are as different in this regard as you seem to believe.
I worry that hardly anyone believes this anymore. Most of my acquaintance seem to think more highly of their favorite youtube "news" purveyor than any journalistic source. In their minds, journalism stopped being a practice some time ago, and now there are just media megacorps that produce check-the-box ideological hit pieces based on which billionaire owns the company at the moment.
I think that actual journalism is still alive in the hearts of many of the employees of those companies, but it's really hard to convince anyone else of that when there's no differentiation in placement or promotion between serious work and shoddy clickbait.
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...
I've tried to get into podcasts more times than I can count. I just can't get there. Besides the advantages you describe, I can "consume" the content SO much more quickly on a page than a podcast, even if I speed it up, which seriously degrades the medium anyway.
I feel like many if not all podcasters are my “friends” who I chat with, only I don’t need to speak. I don’t see why they should convey their ideas any faster. I enjoy whatever time we spend together and it’s usually enough to fill the time on my commute or washing the dishes.
For me, the experience with friends is similar. If I want to mostly hear their voice and feel close to them, voice messages are great, but if I want or need some information then please, just send me a text.
I do listen to my podcasts at about 1.4x, with an additional feature to shorten silences (like pauses, and even between words and sentences) that bumps it up to about 1.5x-1.6x. To me, that makes them feel peppier without feeling rushed. (Compared to the standard pacing associated with radio broadcasts, which is what many podcasters aim for.)
As you note, this is used to provide distraction during time that my hands are busy but my ears aren't: commuting, running, etc. I suspect that at least some of the others in this thread are listening to music under similar circumstances. Or maybe they're just better than me about getting lost in their own thoughts.
Right, but that's precisely the point: Lapham was the editor of Harper's, a top literary/news magazine, for almost 30 years. He was in an institutional position of power, not a random blogger on a new startup's site.
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.
Because 99% of long articles are a waste of time that could be summarized in a sentence or two. This is why no one reads articles here or on Reddit, and just skims the comments instead.
I almost always at least skim an article before diving into the comments. Many times I will read the whole thing, especially if it is short, as this one is. I do believe that most probably don't do that. It's often possible to tell which commenters have read it and which haven't, i.e. if a comment mentions something not even present in the article, or if it mentions something clearly refuted in the article.
I think it's important to read the things you comment on, and I think it's important to expect others to do so as well. Ignorance is tolerated too much these days, especially considering that knowledge is easier to obtain now than ever before.
A lot of long form articles are like online recipes though: A giant barely-related narrative about the subject’s home town and hobbies and life philosophies, and hidden within are the 5 lines showing ingredients and how to cook the food.
Perhaps this is why a lot of comment threads quickly become arguments about the first thing that springs to commenters' minds when they read the headline rather than what the article actually says.
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.
Long-form journalism has been written with an eye to "adding texture" for decades. Some of the most celebrated non-fiction writers of the last half-century—Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson—followed in that tradition.
"In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself."
I’m not saying it doesn’t have its place. I just don’t want it in hard news and related journalism.
Sinatra is not a hard news subject. That would belong in Playboy or RollingStone or New Yorker.
Imagine a WWII article about any of the mustachioed protagonists and it meandered about their choice of whisker trimming and lifestyle in mountain retreats and seaside dachas instead of all the horrors they caused.
"Instead of" would certainly be bad. But the "textural details" of these long-form articles is the sort of experiential glue that can make the scene -- and the facts -- come alive in the mind of the reader. That makes them memorable and relatable, providing hooks to which the reader can attach their understanding. Like the difference between a getting-started guide and chapter one of a reference book -- they both have their place, but they're not the same thing.
As redler noted, you don't want "instead of," but depending on circumstance you might want "in addition to" -- although I think you're stacking the deck a little with your choice. :)
Also, you can invert that -- the story that seems to be about something relatively inconsequential can be a lens on more complex issues. Emily VanDerWerff at Vox is (at least to me) excellent at talking about society, culture and politics by talking about film and television.
To be clear, I don't want everything to sound like new journalism feature pieces, either, and I'm aware we're veering afield from the linked article's complaints. (I don't think I'm fully on board with that article's kvetching, but Ben Smith is definitely no Gay Talese.)
> The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy
Never forget this bias. It's the primary bias of most major news outlets. CNN wants you to keep watching CNN for more news, even if there isn't enough news to fill airtime, so they drag things out, bring on guests, and favor stories with the potential to keep you glued to your TV.
>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices.
Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it.
Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.
Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume.
I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.
> * Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect. *
Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode.
So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.
I'm not sure overall-length would be affected by "short attention span" -- it would be "entertainment spikes" or I suppose "average time between significant events". Perhaps the best term is pacing -- how fast does the story flow?
You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this.
So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc.
From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits.
I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".
>The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy.
Bingo. I honestly think modern "journalism" has more in common with marketing and search engine optimisation than traditional journalism. That's the sort of high-level view I've adopted to explain this decline.
I wrote my first and only substack bit about this last year and have been in two minds whether or not to continue with it.
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.
I used to be a big reader of The New Yorker. To me, they've slipped even more than the Times over the last decade, probably because they were on a higher perch.
For instance "Trolling the Great Outdoors", "Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?", and "Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals?".
And its TV criticism under Emily Nussbaum (who hasn't written an article since 2019 for reasons I haven't been able to figure out) was consistently excellent.
It's not that they are universally terrible now, just that they've fallen into the same political-hype blackhole as everyone else.
I remember looking at their home page a few years ago and seeing the top 10 articles all being about Trump. That obsession with politics didn't really happen in previous eras and even when it did, it was counterbalanced by some legitimate literary criticism. Looking at their home page now, it's uh, not quite the same.
It's certainly true that it's gotten more topical and hence more overtly political. Part of this is surely a change to having more of an online readership (and online-only articles). When you're writing a magazine piece, it can be at best a week behind the news. This constraint doesn't exist for online pieces.
That being said, I think the New Yorker still offers some of the best and nuanced political analysis. I certainly prefer it to the New York Times.
I fault David Remnick, the editor, for this. He really became obsessed with Trump during his presidency.
The thing is, it seems like Mr. Remnick has been a very good administrator of the magazine, guiding it through a very rough time for print media, so the chances that he will be replaced or step down anytime soon are slim.
That said, I am looking forward to a fresh perspective for the magazine in the future even if I still mostly enjoy it now.
My approach is to take their weekly magazines (paper or digital) instead of browsing through the home page. Weekly editions still include an article or two on US politics, but in general are significantly more diverse.
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.
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 think pomo is responsible, along with a handful of other factors: clickbait journalism, dramatically increased echo chamber of journalists due to social media, and (perhaps most importantly), the changing values of Millenials.
Regarding the latter, it's only when Millenials started moving up the career ladder at these organizations in the early 2010s that we saw the publications really change. And the insider reports from the NYTimes indicate the change in reporting is basically an outcome of generational conflict.
Obviously, many on here are the exception, but in general, younger GenX, Millenials, and Zoomers were all financially screwed over, and they've (perhaps understandably) taken out their rage on society. Why so many have adopted a race-based identitarian outlook, instead of aiming for race-blind equality, I understand much less.
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.
It is funny, because I read journalists complaining about exactly opposite. Journalism used to be a place where local non-elite people went. It did not required special education, but became more elite over time.
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!
When I say prestige, I mean among the population at large. The average person in America no longer looks at the Times as a prestigious organization. A few decades ago, they did.
NYT: the paper of "record." Regardless of past or modern quality, it seems kind of arrogant for a promulgater of copy to proclaim they have undisputed monopolies on truth and facts, doesn't it?
It's a term of art and doesn't have the meaning you attribute to it. Here's the definition from Wikipedia: "A newspaper of record is a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative."
When you consider NYC's other news dailies (the NY Post and the Daily News), it would be hard to disagree that the NYT is the most authoritative.
> It's a term of art [..] "A newspaper of record is a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative."
One definition of "authoritative" would be "able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable"
I'm not sure how anyone could seriously believe that to be an appropriate way to describe the NYT (or indeed any of their major competitors).
To be blunt: they're "accurate" and/or "true", except for the all the times when they aren't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Talent costs money. Money most can't afford to pay. Back when papers actually had money, those at the top weren't paid well to begin with.
The major paper in the state I used to live in went completely out of business and had their building repossessed. It was resurrected some time later and is now 8 pages long. Most of that is AP news and cartoons and crossword. Last I looked, there was barely 2 pages of news including the AP articles.
Their pay is so low, one would make more money working at the supermarket as a cashier.
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.
I also sense that newspapers are retaining the old guard talent at the expense of younger, more fresh voices. For instance the New York times constantly puts peices up by Paul Krugman and he almost never writes anything insightful. Given his credentials, I assume he commands a high price for his commentary. I assume the business side thinks name recognition is more important than taking risks on new writers.
Sometime in the 80s when the major networks decided the newsroom, which had been a cost sink but was considered prestigious, should at least be able to pay for itself. The networks were losing profits to cable channels. As they cut costs and demanded revenue, the quality of broadcast news went to hell. Oh, and President Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. https://publicseminar.org/essays/ronald-reagans-worst-decisi...
Newspapers somewhat followed suit, but they had always been ad-supported, so it wasn't until Craigslist and the like came along and took their classified income that they really started to feel the pinch.
Fast-forward to the early 21st century and the rise of click-bait news sites; newspapers couldn't compete. Papers also started getting snapped up by private equity firms, doing what private equity firms do.
Editing was the first casualty, but then pay for writers went on a race to the bottom. Good writers mostly abandoned the news and became freelancers, writing copy for whatever outlet would pay them.
> 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!
It’s a great example of how people will use an easy quantification just because it exists. There’s a popular mindset that seems to think you can’t argue against numbers and math because they’re cold and scientific. Who cares if its a stupid number, it’s mathematically/scientifically correct!
It's a variant of Goodhart's law. Can't speak for the person you're replying to, but absent good management, I've seen review goals turn into nonsense. "You had a goal to fix 5 bugs this quarter, and only fixed 4", "but one was a massive bug that would have cost us $x!", "but you didn't fix 5 bugs, so no bonus"
You see it happen on different levels a surprising number of times.
Anecdotally, when I worked in customer support, we were explicitly told that we had to hit a certain number of replies to customers in our ticket system. So I played by the rules: I very clearly grabbed all the easy-to-reply tickets, sent the easy reply, and dropped them if they got hard.
Appropriately, a manager spoke to me telling me this was unacceptable (though he did concede the goal was stupid), and gratifyingly the official goals soon changed to reflect an appropriate balance of consistency with a customer as well as some degree of overall throughput.
The drawback there is that accurately reflecting what they want in hard metrics might not really be possible because it does come down to a judgment call where the exact balance between support quality and throughput lies (and it's often a shifting balance as well, depending how much support load there is). Which is probably why managers fall back on stupid but easy-to-measure metrics.
It does in my experience, I work for a gov public safety agency and the numbers they show you are one part of the story. In public policy we learned how you determine what the thresholds are (When does good become excellent?), as well as things like what does improvement mean (a ten percent decrease in raw number? ten percent decrease from last years average?) mean that the framing of metrics must always be examined. Not to mention the litany of inside baseball stuff regarding how various things like 911 calls, car crashes, crimes, and population figures are captured, analyzed, and understood.
Outside of numbers. The same logic applies to fact checking sites which is why I always question why so many people use them to refute arguements. The authors decided what was deemed a good source.
A dirty secret I’ve noticed of the most controversial issues at the end of the day can be argued successfully both ways, so the fact checkers effectively choose the side they agree with. For example, should Texas be demonized for removing their mask mandates? Lot of areas in Texas are very remote. Texas is more insular of a state than say New Jersey. Federalism and US legal history typically affords states the latitude to make decisions for themselves based on their populations desires. To what extent does interstate commerce (flying out of Texas for example) justify outside/Federal force to upend Texas sovereignty? Lot of people try to argue Texas is just wrong but it’s deeper than that.
you can't argue against numbers, you can absolutely argue against arbitrary numbers (like in this example the premise is that the app produces reliable results, which it does not and anyway it should be proved with good, hard to dispute, numbers)
OP's point is that all numbers are arbitrary (to varying degrees). The act of quantifying always imposes some sort of framework on what you're trying to look at, and we live in an age of pretty vulgar scientism where this is associated with 'objectivity'.
From 'personality scores' for applicants, to social credit scores, and in this case the quality of writing in a newspaper.
Right. The number 3 is inarguable. That 4+2=6 is inarguable. The applicability of a give statistic to a given situation or argument is a much more difficult proposition, but people too frequently treat a statistic as relevant just because it's easy to compute.
After all mercury is in retrograde, and that's a scientific fact.
I have no intention of using Hemingway or anything like it, but I think it is obviously targeted at business communication, not literature, so it's unsurprising that it would find issues with literature excerpts.
I like the Hemingway app, but it is very much designed to make you write like Hemingway (ie short, clear sentences _only_). Obviously most great writing is not in this style.
The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or if you happen to like that style. It is hardly the universal arbiter of "poor or confusing writing".
I was coming to say the same, and the descriptors being removed actually just points mote to its usefulness for writing 'in a Hemingway style'.
However, having said that I don't think the author of this article used it well, as for many reasons most any journalistic article is going to be very descriptive and use things like puns to get/maintain a reader's attention (something I personally usually hate, but not always).
I think it would be fun to create a version of this which pushes writing towards other recognizable styles like Raymond Chandler or David Foster Wallace. Maybe you pick a style from a dropdown and the analysis changes. You could possibly take it even further and automate some transformations of the input to stylize a piece of writing.
To satisfy a DFW style it'd need to understand 2 page long sentences with multiple footnotes per sentence. Haha. It would be a fun one to do though! (I say that loving DFW)
When it comes to newspapers isn't this the goal, though? Hemingway's writing is journalistic writing. "The [Kansas City] Star’s style guide formed the basis for his own style that ran against the elaborate tendencies of 19th century writers."[1] So if you're judging the style of a journalist's writing a preferable guide is how similar to Hemingway it is.
I would say, no not really. The goal is to make writing readable to human, not same as Hemingway wrote. Those are two different goals, despite Hemingway being also readable.
Practically, I don't have problem to understand American major newspapers.
reminded - on some estate sale here in US i randomly picked up and opened a small end-of-19th century book of some American writer that i never heard (that just means that it is definitely not a Tier-1 writer as i'm not an American). The first large paragraph consisted of just 2, yet pretty large, multipart sentences with several great ideas and observations masterfully woven together. I was awestruck. In Russia we call it "Tolstoy" (War and Peace) style and that beat even the Tolstoy. I immediately closed the book, quietly put it back. It was a very uncomfortable reminder of what we lost. The times has changed.
There are plenty of writers - I know several - that seem to think Hemingway's style is the "correct" one. And it may be, for business use-cases, where clarity is more important than beauty, insight, nuance, individuality, or consonance with the meaning of the text.
I sometimes write for one of the online tech pubs. The tool you publish through has a reading difficulty score which I always fail. (I mostly ignore it; at most I might tweak a couple of things.) Also all sorts of SEO-related stuff.
I use the tool for all of my blog posts. It’s a stellar tool with a couple of killer features. I 100% promise if you the tool it will improve the quality of your writing.
That said, it does not identify “good writing” or “bad writing”. It is not sacrosanct. And it definitely can’t write for you.
It’s perfectly valid to leave in yellow or red sentences. But the tool helps make it a conscious decision when to do so.
It’ll improve your writing if you’re a lazy, inattentive, careless writer. If you have any writing ability and pay attention to what you are doing, it’s worthless.
So I don't know anything about this app really or its evaluations but I think applying it to acclaimed fiction is not a criticism of applying it to a newspaper article per se.
News articles are meant to convey concrete information relatively concisely. So metrics like sentence length and complexity and adverb count are at least in theory valid things for it to measure and aim to reduce.
Now whether it effectively measures those things I have no idea or opinion about. I didn't know it existed until ten minutes ago but if I had I definitely would have predicted that most highly respected fiction would break its rules all over the place.
That Times article is not great. Not sure if I'd have made it through the first paragraph. That said, these types of tools often seem to be about dumbing things down to increase "engagement."
For kicks, I threw a few paragraphs from The old man and the sea to see if the editor displayed any deference to its namesake. Red all over, "very hard to read", "use of the passive voice".
Yup, any kind of automatic quality assessment tool is made with the assumption that quality is even something that can be measured objectively.
Zoe Bee recently made a pretty good video about why this falls completely flat for grammar (rather than just appealing to "X is good, Y disagrees, Y must be wrong"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5rB9jDbTPU
I think you’re misunderstanding this tool. You’re shoving a Monet into a tool for graphic designers and complaining that it flags it as blurry.
Writing for news should be boring, dry, precise, clear and near painfully explicit with as little subtext as can possibly be achieved. Hemingway’s writing style just happens to be a good example of it.
I think you and people in this thread are confusing news with storytelling/newstainment like John Oliver, lots of Gimlet, Vice, etc. who take the news and up the production value by infusing their personalities and commentary. Despite the crass name this is a valuable service. Good storytellers are the bridge between the dry academic work of historians, journalists, scientists, philosophers, etc. and people outside their respective fields.
tl;dr news isn’t art and can’t be judged by the same measures.
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.
You might enjoy this researcher's automated high scoring essay generator
> Our hypothesis was simple. If the AES machine consistently gave high scores to machine generated gibberish, we could surmise that 1) the construct being measured by the machines is not an essential component of human communication; and 2) students could be taught similar strategies to achieve high scores on computer scored writing tests by sprinkling their prose with long meaningless sentences composed of pretentious and irrelevant words.
> Our greatest surprise was how easy it was to fool all of the machines. We succeeded on our first try, demonstrating that rather than being elegant and complex manifestations of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, these engines could best be characterized as crude stupid machines.
EDIT (an example):
> We have now used the Babel Generator over twenty times to generate essays for the site, which, when submitted, receive top scores with comments such as articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task and sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically” for essays that read like this following opening paragraph:
> Careers with corroboration has not, and in all likelihood never will be compassionate, gratuitous, and disciplinary. Mankind will always proclaim noesis; many for a trope but a few on executioner. A quantity of vocation lies in the study of reality as well as the area of semantics. Why is imaginativeness so pulverous to happenstance? The reply to this query is that knowledge is vehemently and boisterously contemporary.
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.
I am a bit surprised about: " The Lottery is considered a masterpiece of a short story, and is widely taught in American high schools."
Really? I have difficulties understanding this. Is it because it is interesting for the kids through its shock value and manageable length? But this then looks to me like declaring ketchup to be vegetables so enough veggies are eaten at the canteen.
Well, I suppose you could read some critical analysis of it if you're interested in why it's considered great; I'm no expert. For what it's worth I agree with its status in the canon: it's a powerful and carefully articulated story in a very compact form with a unique, exciting, and thought-provoking premise. The perfect short story.
That’s not a given, unfortunately. I believe that the intended long term strategy is to give kids a glimpse of something that is outwardly interesting, in order to increase their internal motivation to seek out other good reading material. Not necessarily to get it “right” the first time.
I don't claim to know the current thinking but, to me, it makes sense that the focus should be on "classic" literature (for which The Lottery qualifies) that's also approachable. I'd argue that a lot of Hemingway and Fitzgerald do as well--though I don't fully understand the popularity of The Old Man and the Sea.
I liked reading in high school and most of the 19th and 18th century works I read bored me to tears and I probably ended up at least partly just reading the Cliff Notes. Today, I expect I would go to Wikipedia.
The parallel is in the perpetuation of destructive societal practices in the name of tradition, and in people being in favor of those destructive practices until it affects them: then it's suddenly not fair.
You can find that situation in so many places in modern culture that there's no point listing any, it's like looking for air.
English is not my first language, so it astonishes me that some people really think that short sentences make good writing. Anyone can write bad prose using short sentences. Moreover, by writing in this way the language loses any kind of spice, so it's not a surprise that journalism and technical texts are so unpalatable. Another consequence is that even educated people never stop sounding like they're talking to a ten year old.
But in a sense I realize why this is a problem in English: German an some latin languages have grammatical structure to make it easier to create and understand long phrases. English lacks much of that structure. So, long phrases are difficult to parse. Compare for example Proust novels written in English and in his French original. In English it is almost gibberish, even in good translations.
That's probably true. I would have had to work to parse the first sentence in that article. The other thing going on is that, for many situations, the use of punctuation within long sentences to help the reader has sort of fallen out of fashion relative to breaking long sentences up. It's probably also more acceptable to use sentence fragments in certain types of prose.
> The other thing going on is that, for many situations, the use of punctuation within long sentences to help the reader has sort of fallen out of fashion relative to breaking long sentences up.
Semicolons, colons, and dashes, are rarely used now days.
Heck I am impressed when I see a dash properly used, I myself cannot lay claim to such knowledge. I am almost 100% certain that their usage was not taught to me in either school or college.
I use em dashes a fair bit (and have to remember the spacing style of the publication I'm writing for). But I'm much more inclined to break a sentence in two rather than use a semicolon unless there are two very connected thoughts.
But I've always wondered: why should business writing be like Hemingway's writing? He wasn't writing for that audience. Seems like it would be better to find examples of good writing for a business audience and use those. Same thing for journalistic writing: that's not what Hemingway was doing. Maybe take all the Pulitzer winning journalism from a few decades and use that or something. But it just seems weird to pick one arbitrary literary writer for this kind of exercise.
Agreed. The general style values simple sentences which helps reading speed and comprehension, especially for audiences that don't share your native language. And it reduces fluff. Adverbs, for example, generally don't help make a point in business writing - data does.
See the example in that last sentence? I snuck a premise instead of stating it as a hypothesis or providing data to support it. At best that causes confusion for the reader and at worst it can mislead people that aren't carefully watching out for pitfalls like that.
True but we should aim to tag more of them in business writing. It's helpful to clearly state them so 1. You as the writer are crystal clear on the assumptions you're making, and 2. if there's any disagreement on premises you can resolve it before you spend any time discussing which course of action to take.
But my quibble is that I don't think Hemingway valued efficiency. It would be much more efficient to write "There was a man in the hospital who had lost his reproductive organs and this resulted in a tragically failed romance" but that is not how he wrote the story, because it's bad literature. But if someone at work asked me to write them an email about it, that's what I would write, because it's much more efficient than a whole novel.
Won't speak to literary/journalistic writing, but business writing definitely has a problem of quantity over quality. The exercise of really dumbing down the language helps with making sure you're actually getting the point across instead of just talking in vague abstractions. It also helps for communicating with ESL colleagues. In that sense, "more like Hemingway" is probably going in the right direction.
I guess it's that I've always thought this is a misunderstanding of what Hemingway was doing. He wasn't trying to write simple language comprehensible to busy business people trying to get their jobs done. He was trying to write good literature as he saw it. Any alignment of the two things is accidental at best but often just a misapplication. He left things out in order for them to exist in the reader's own imaginative journey through the book; his spareness was a way of welcoming the reader into the story. That is not a good thing in business writing!
That Shirley Jackson example is particularly galling because her prose is considered by many people to be about as close to perfect as a human can get. Better than Hemingway's. IIRC, her editor said in an interview that she was their easiest client to work with, because her work didn't actually need editing.
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.
I believe red and yellow just mean the 'reading level' expected. When writing for a very broad audience, or writing things that need to be short and easy to read like e-mails, you want to aim for 'lower' reading levels.
I pasted some excerpts from a paper I was reading and it gave the 'Post-Graduate' reading level.
Does not mean it's bad writing, just hard to read (it's probably inevitable at that level).
It's probably a great tool for daily work, some people at my workplace used Grammarly, but it's paid, so this could be a good alternative.
All these types of apps do that, sometimes with a recommended max guideline. It's not a terrible heuristic like "Never use passive voice" is. Over some threshold, there's probably too much of it.
Writer here, reasonably competent, because people pay me for writing (in Czech; forgive me my English errors).
Passive voice in narration is ... strange most of the time. It kicks the reader out of the situation, like Out-of-body experience, only it is an Out-of-book experience.
"John was killed by the assassins, his body was later discovered by a cleaning lady, carried out by morticians and dissected by pathologists."
It is pretty hard to feel any emotions around this almost technically cold description. A sentence like this could have come from a police dossier.
I am not a friend of software validation tools in this regard, though. Capturing the essence of beauty in words isn't a solved problem.
Slavs in general tend to struggle with "a/an/the" in English, because most Slavic languages lack articles. Out of the entire language family, only Bulgarian uses definite articles.
Articles feel unnatural to me, too. I got used to them, but in a similar way that one gets used to a prosthetic arm: you can do things, but it feels mechanic and distant.
"The assassins killed John, the cleaning lady discovered his body later, the morticians carried him out and the pathologists dissected him."
It is better, though not massively so. It's tighter. (Personally I'd break it into four sentences, but that's just me. I also would have used an Oxford comma, for that matter.)
The real problem is that the passive voice can be used for:
"John was killed, his body was later discovered, carried out, and dissected".
It's definitely punchy, and as the beginning of a thriller novel its vagueness could be exciting. But any place else you're left mostly with questions. It would be terrible in a newspaper account. And in an actual police report, it would sound like somebody was covering something up.
Well said. It’s like people think they have to get the machine to validate them instead of the other way around. I was coaching somebody’s writing recently and trying to tell them not to modify their style based on Hemingway feedback, but they just had so much faith in it. Why would so many people use it if it wasn’t reliable, right?
Sounds like a set of training wheels. Helpful for those begging to learn, but extremely limiting if you don't learn to take them off once you have the basics. I can definitely see the benefit of such an application, but the risks are also quickly apparent. Looking at it from one level higher, I think I would be in favor of such an application because those who don't ever take the training wheels off will, on average, gain more than had they never had it while those who would be held back by it are likely to outgrow it on their own pace. The only real threat is if it becomes a tool of authority, like teachers that depend upon it and mark down writing that the app doesn't like.
I agree, Hemingway is a useful tool for editing, but it's not any kind of authority on what "good" or "bad" writing is. It's great for reducing your word count during final edit, but that's about it.
What Bee said really resonated with me. I used to be a stickler for grammar rules and "proper" English, but as I've progressed in life I've come to realize that those rules are all secondary. All that really matters is that you are understood in the way you want to be understood.
Grammar rules help educate people about common idioms and structures so that they can understand others and be understood themselves. Additionally, by following a certain set of grammatical conventions, you can change the way you are perceived. By ignoring the rules, one might be seen as erudite and sophisiticated. OTOH u dont always want to seem stuckup :)
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.
Oh... I could have sworn the "solipsistic change taking place in discourse" was that no one truly knows anything, that we're all just making shit up and stacking the shit into empires--indulging the pastime of 'bullshit-science' because we're afraid to admit we "don't know" and that ultimately the only thing we are in control of regarding knowledge is that of completely letting go of control.
When you think about it, we don't even know what knowledge is--what is it to posses (can it even be possessed?) the 'essence of knowledge'? Kinda makes you wonder if knowledge is nothing but the 'spiralcy study' of inevitable and ineffable Death--If all was known, could we really claim anything was ever truly alive?
A lot of publications have gone really bad in just the last few years. Back home we learnt English from newspapers. My English would be terrible if I attempt it now.
British publications FT and The Economist still hold their standards high. They both have quality, well-researched content with commendable language to back it up.
The Economist (which I'm very familiar with) to me should be a model of how newspapers should operate. Make their biases up-front and clear (The Economist is written for and by believers in liberalism) but then report the facts well and clearly. It does help that they manage to tie in some nice british humour to make articles engaging.
I think it also helps that it is a weekly publication, which regularizes the sensationalist events of the day.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadCompare and contrast the average newspaper article written in say 1921 compared to now. The difference in comprehension level is pretty glaring.
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.
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.
In any case, the complaint being made (which I'm not sure that I buy) is that it's _more_ poorly written (and thus hard to read) today, not _less_.
https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-...
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...
Sadly, publishers 1) are competing with e.g. books self-published on Amazon, and 2) noticed that the mass market consuming those Amazon self-published efforts seems pretty OK with content that is full of typos and bad-quality typesetting, so why even bother any more?
It's no wonder more and more people don't care about virtually unedited published content. In addition to not caring, often times they don't even know the difference.
Which begs the question for me: what is it they say we're getting with all these standardized tests and the singular focus on teaching kids to pass those tests again? Because it seems to me we're about to have a populace doesn't read and can't write.
I also think that there’s fewer pedants complaining in letters to the editor about these kinds of errors. And probably fewer editors paid to read any letters.
Finally, since any discussions I have with friends about the NYT turn into a tribal discussion, there’s a weird situation where people defend poor writing and editing because they are pro-NYT. So I tend to avoid, or at least not participate because they are so pointless and boring.
Copy editors do far more than people assume [1]:
> The dirty little secret of newspaper journalists is that a lot of them can't write very well. That's by no means universally true, but it's true enough. [...] I transformed some real trash into publishable writing, saved my paper and some writers from professional embarrassment, and introduced relatively few errors on my own.
And from the comments:
> Having worked at small, mid and metro newspapers, I can tell you reporters who can't write very well exist everywhere. When I first started working at a major metro, I thought all of the raw copy would be flawless. After all, these reporters were working at a metro daily. But there were plenty of reporters who really needed the old rewrite desk. Some reporters, of course, were very good writers But pity the poor reader if copy editors disappear.
[1] http://www.yelvington.com/content/07-08-2008/death-copy-edit...
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.
Journalists are now just copywriters; optimizing for SEO and Google's spiders.
That or any other non-ad funded media source.
Danish newspapers are filled with bad spelling and broken language. It's pretty clear that they're hiring people to translate or piece together articles.
The real investigating articles are still well written, but there aren't enough of those to fill the paper or update the website multiple times a day.
(This sounds like I'm bashing journalists, but I'm not.)
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.
Density: I make this mistake often. I end up chaining multiple thoughts rather than splitting them up into discrete sentences that link thoughts together. It maybe easier to write but it's harder to read.
I use commas for things that can be mentally skipped and lists, and semicolons for related sentence fragments. It's probably an anti-pattern to use semicolons except as a greater grouping like: do you want apples, pears, and bananas; chicken, fish, and beef; or lettuce, tomatoes, and onions?
- 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.)
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.
Whenever I find a stray copy of S&W, I throw it away. I have tossed a bunch. Everything in it is either trivial or wrong. The trivial parts wouldn't make a book, so White added lots of wrong.
After his teacher, Strunk, died, White made up a bunch more fake rules, and then went back and doctored Strunk's text to obey them. But he didn't even notice he was violating them in his own text.
For the detailed rundown, search "nasty book pullum strunk".
Through random circumstances I wound up reading the print edition of my city’s daily broadsheet for a few months. The difference in writing style and structure was incredible — the local paper felt dumbed down in comparison. Going back to the Times was like a breath of fresh air. This was a couple decades ago.
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.
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.
What happened to "newsweek"?
The internet happened, and it became The Daily Beast, and then it became a zombie publication with nothing in common with the old print edition.
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.
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.
But even if not breaking, certainly important.
This boils down the current style of giving a long-form article (story!) to every new piece of information.
And then to top it off sometimes a random smattering of these tidbits and factoids get crumpled together into a ball of front page articles, with "amazing production value". Big 4K pictures, a 3-4 paragraph intro, a personal touch, namedroppings.
What's missing is "obviously" what social science is supposedly about. Models, hypotheses, data, and picking the best one. Sure, articles provide this in a very crude form, via stories, appeals to some authority (when they cite/interview a random Professor of X at University of Y, who of course happens to be the Random Dude Z Chair), sometimes there are even a few graphs too!
However, it seems the main function of established media these days is to try to follow what's going on in the world and establish a record, ask questions, try to look/peer into the nasty machine of contemporary politics and power, scratch the surface, kick the tires, and so on. They are not really here to interpret and explain it.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
Those lead to mispronunciation of the words, in the examples you cite.
edit: ah... because they're not umlauts, they're diaeresis. Still, unneeded.
In a way this is fantastic, we shouldn't have two or three newspaper owners running almost all media under the vestedge of prestige.
I like https://substack.com/, but there are plenty of other like sources available.
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.
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
The revenue for a local paper used to come primarily from advertising that doesn't exist anymore. Movie theater listings, classified ads, auto dealership sections. The Real Estate "section".
Each of those have been picked off by apps and websites. Craigslist, IMDB, Redfin/Zillow, etc.
And it's a spiral. With each reduction in circulation, the attractiveness for advertisers drops. Any attempt to make up the shortfall with higher subscription rates just accelerates the downfall.
So we get conglomerates that try to manage costs by being "local" in name only. They can't afford to employ reporters in every town with 75,000 residents. You instead get local papers that are just a reskin of a common wire feed. A few easy articles that could be GPT'd from the police blotter. Maybe a blogger or two.
Newspapers would charge for a subscription and sell advertising. The subscription fee would essentially just pay for printing and distribution of the physical newspaper, and then advertising provided the margin.
Now advertising is in the dumps but the internet has removed the capital and operating costs of a printing press and physically delivering dead tree pages to doorsteps.
Traditional newspaper subscriptions were something like $10/month. If you have 50,000 local subscribers and negligible printing costs, that's $6,000,000/year. You can fit a full staff of journalists into that budget.
Or you can go it alone, charge the same $10/month and be making $120,000/year with 1000 subscribers.
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 journalists. Which is the same whether they all work for one publication or they all work for themselves.
"Publications" will probably become subscription aggregators. So instead of 50,000 people each paying $10/month to one of 50 independent journalists such that they each have 1000 subscribers, all 50,000 people pay $10/month to the aggregator and then get access to the work of all 50 journalists.
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.
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.
I hear that phrase a lot, but then I'm probably more sensitive to that.
Of course this does not apply all the time, and you should evaluate the content and make a proper judgment. But I see this pattern way too often, that those who want to push some point will just invoke "the Truth" to give it more impact - after all, who can deny the truth?
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.
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.
Edit: ninja'd.
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).
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
'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
NYT is one paper, from one city. The scope of print journalism is vast and probably defeats podcasts 100 to 1.
For the most part, podcast reporting is closer to magazine reporting than newspapers. ('Democracy Now' is maybe the exception that proves the rule?) But given the survival rate of magazines at this point in history, it's obvious that podcasts are where you're going to see more innovation.
Now there's definitely an argument to be made that it routinely fails to live up to those standards and that it has certain structural weaknesses and biases that need to be addressed.
But it is, overall, a system of professionals who consider their work to be constrained in certain ways that are ethically important to them and the world. Individual podcasters might adhere to some of these standards but as a field it has no aspirations to that. Same with journalists leaving established papers to publish on substack with no editorial oversight. They are not practicing journalism as journalists see the field.
These things might replace journalism but they aren't it.
I'm also not claiming that podcasting can't be journalism, just that the structures necessary for it to be aren't widespread or generally highly valued by podcasters as a group. Plenty of journalists do use it as their medium but that doesn't make podcasting and journalism the same thing.
Journalism is a subset of (text/audio), and some (writers/podcasters) care a lot more about journalistic standards than others.
I would argue that podcasting institutions - npr and affiliates, gimlet, radiotopia - actually do have a lot of understanding and respect for journalistic standards, and also represent a very large share of the most popular podcasts. I don't think the two media are as different in this regard as you seem to believe.
I think that actual journalism is still alive in the hearts of many of the employees of those companies, but it's really hard to convince anyone else of that when there's no differentiation in placement or promotion between serious work and shoddy clickbait.
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...
As you note, this is used to provide distraction during time that my hands are busy but my ears aren't: commuting, running, etc. I suspect that at least some of the others in this thread are listening to music under similar circumstances. Or maybe they're just better than me about getting lost in their own thoughts.
If this person exists today, they are much more likely to be found on Substack than at The New York Times.
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 think it's important to read the things you comment on, and I think it's important to expect others to do so as well. Ignorance is tolerated too much these days, especially considering that knowledge is easier to obtain now than ever before.
A good case in point is the biggest ideas in Statistics paper that's hovered around the front page for a while.
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.
"In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself."
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has...
Sinatra is not a hard news subject. That would belong in Playboy or RollingStone or New Yorker.
Imagine a WWII article about any of the mustachioed protagonists and it meandered about their choice of whisker trimming and lifestyle in mountain retreats and seaside dachas instead of all the horrors they caused.
Also, you can invert that -- the story that seems to be about something relatively inconsequential can be a lens on more complex issues. Emily VanDerWerff at Vox is (at least to me) excellent at talking about society, culture and politics by talking about film and television.
To be clear, I don't want everything to sound like new journalism feature pieces, either, and I'm aware we're veering afield from the linked article's complaints. (I don't think I'm fully on board with that article's kvetching, but Ben Smith is definitely no Gay Talese.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
Never forget this bias. It's the primary bias of most major news outlets. CNN wants you to keep watching CNN for more news, even if there isn't enough news to fill airtime, so they drag things out, bring on guests, and favor stories with the potential to keep you glued to your TV.
Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it.
Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.
I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.
Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode.
So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.
You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this.
So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc.
From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits.
I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".
Bingo. I honestly think modern "journalism" has more in common with marketing and search engine optimisation than traditional journalism. That's the sort of high-level view I've adopted to explain this decline.
I wrote my first and only substack bit about this last year and have been in two minds whether or not to continue with it.
https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-...
But just looking at some of ones from this year highlighted on longform, there was some great stuff here: https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-yorker
For instance "Trolling the Great Outdoors", "Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?", and "Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals?".
And its TV criticism under Emily Nussbaum (who hasn't written an article since 2019 for reasons I haven't been able to figure out) was consistently excellent.
I remember looking at their home page a few years ago and seeing the top 10 articles all being about Trump. That obsession with politics didn't really happen in previous eras and even when it did, it was counterbalanced by some legitimate literary criticism. Looking at their home page now, it's uh, not quite the same.
That being said, I think the New Yorker still offers some of the best and nuanced political analysis. I certainly prefer it to the New York Times.
The thing is, it seems like Mr. Remnick has been a very good administrator of the magazine, guiding it through a very rough time for print media, so the chances that he will be replaced or step down anytime soon are slim.
That said, I am looking forward to a fresh perspective for the magazine in the future even if I still mostly enjoy it now.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...
Regarding the latter, it's only when Millenials started moving up the career ladder at these organizations in the early 2010s that we saw the publications really change. And the insider reports from the NYTimes indicate the change in reporting is basically an outcome of generational conflict.
Obviously, many on here are the exception, but in general, younger GenX, Millenials, and Zoomers were all financially screwed over, and they've (perhaps understandably) taken out their rage on society. Why so many have adopted a race-based identitarian outlook, instead of aiming for race-blind equality, I understand much less.
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.
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!
When you consider NYC's other news dailies (the NY Post and the Daily News), it would be hard to disagree that the NYT is the most authoritative.
One definition of "authoritative" would be "able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable"
I'm not sure how anyone could seriously believe that to be an appropriate way to describe the NYT (or indeed any of their major competitors).
To be blunt: they're "accurate" and/or "true", except for the all the times when they aren't.
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.
The major paper in the state I used to live in went completely out of business and had their building repossessed. It was resurrected some time later and is now 8 pages long. Most of that is AP news and cartoons and crossword. Last I looked, there was barely 2 pages of news including the AP articles.
Their pay is so low, one would make more money working at the supermarket as a cashier.
Newspapers somewhat followed suit, but they had always been ad-supported, so it wasn't until Craigslist and the like came along and took their classified income that they really started to feel the pinch.
Fast-forward to the early 21st century and the rise of click-bait news sites; newspapers couldn't compete. Papers also started getting snapped up by private equity firms, doing what private equity firms do.
Editing was the first casualty, but then pay for writers went on a race to the bottom. Good writers mostly abandoned the news and became freelancers, writing copy for whatever outlet would pay them.
tl;dr late-stage neoliberal capitalism happened.
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!
Notable potential Goodhart's law situations:
- Testing in education
- GDP (or a number of other economic indicators) as a measure of economic performance/target for economic performance
- Healthcare outcomes along a number of axes
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You see it happen on different levels a surprising number of times.
Appropriately, a manager spoke to me telling me this was unacceptable (though he did concede the goal was stupid), and gratifyingly the official goals soon changed to reflect an appropriate balance of consistency with a customer as well as some degree of overall throughput.
The drawback there is that accurately reflecting what they want in hard metrics might not really be possible because it does come down to a judgment call where the exact balance between support quality and throughput lies (and it's often a shifting balance as well, depending how much support load there is). Which is probably why managers fall back on stupid but easy-to-measure metrics.
Outside of numbers. The same logic applies to fact checking sites which is why I always question why so many people use them to refute arguements. The authors decided what was deemed a good source.
A dirty secret I’ve noticed of the most controversial issues at the end of the day can be argued successfully both ways, so the fact checkers effectively choose the side they agree with. For example, should Texas be demonized for removing their mask mandates? Lot of areas in Texas are very remote. Texas is more insular of a state than say New Jersey. Federalism and US legal history typically affords states the latitude to make decisions for themselves based on their populations desires. To what extent does interstate commerce (flying out of Texas for example) justify outside/Federal force to upend Texas sovereignty? Lot of people try to argue Texas is just wrong but it’s deeper than that.
you can't argue against numbers, you can absolutely argue against arbitrary numbers (like in this example the premise is that the app produces reliable results, which it does not and anyway it should be proved with good, hard to dispute, numbers)
From 'personality scores' for applicants, to social credit scores, and in this case the quality of writing in a newspaper.
After all mercury is in retrograde, and that's a scientific fact.
8 of 263 sentences are hard to read. 15 of 263 sentences are very hard to read.
The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or if you happen to like that style. It is hardly the universal arbiter of "poor or confusing writing".
However, having said that I don't think the author of this article used it well, as for many reasons most any journalistic article is going to be very descriptive and use things like puns to get/maintain a reader's attention (something I personally usually hate, but not always).
[1] https://mediahq.com/famous-authors-also-journalists/
Practically, I don't have problem to understand American major newspapers.
reminded - on some estate sale here in US i randomly picked up and opened a small end-of-19th century book of some American writer that i never heard (that just means that it is definitely not a Tier-1 writer as i'm not an American). The first large paragraph consisted of just 2, yet pretty large, multipart sentences with several great ideas and observations masterfully woven together. I was awestruck. In Russia we call it "Tolstoy" (War and Peace) style and that beat even the Tolstoy. I immediately closed the book, quietly put it back. It was a very uncomfortable reminder of what we lost. The times has changed.
I like to imagine that Finnegans Wake would result in a crash.
Horrible take.
I use the tool for all of my blog posts. It’s a stellar tool with a couple of killer features. I 100% promise if you the tool it will improve the quality of your writing.
That said, it does not identify “good writing” or “bad writing”. It is not sacrosanct. And it definitely can’t write for you.
It’s perfectly valid to leave in yellow or red sentences. But the tool helps make it a conscious decision when to do so.
Feel free to read my blog. I used Hemingwayapp on almost every post. I’ll let you decide if I’m a lazy, inattentive, careless writer.
https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/
News articles are meant to convey concrete information relatively concisely. So metrics like sentence length and complexity and adverb count are at least in theory valid things for it to measure and aim to reduce.
Now whether it effectively measures those things I have no idea or opinion about. I didn't know it existed until ten minutes ago but if I had I definitely would have predicted that most highly respected fiction would break its rules all over the place.
It absolutely conforms to different rules than a news article on page A1.
I mean, I think it's bad writing too! But it'd be bad writing if it were in something like the New Yorker, too.
I also pasted the first page of The Lottery, and it scored it a Grade of 11, Readability: OK, compared to a 14 on the Times article.
Do you find the times article mentioned easy to read or well written?
Zoe Bee recently made a pretty good video about why this falls completely flat for grammar (rather than just appealing to "X is good, Y disagrees, Y must be wrong"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5rB9jDbTPU
Although I somewhat agree with the premise, especially with science and tech journalism.
Most is fine, but every so often there's an article which looks like it was written by someone for whom English is a fifth language.
Blog posts can be hit and miss too, but that's not such a surprise.
Writing for news should be boring, dry, precise, clear and near painfully explicit with as little subtext as can possibly be achieved. Hemingway’s writing style just happens to be a good example of it.
I think you and people in this thread are confusing news with storytelling/newstainment like John Oliver, lots of Gimlet, Vice, etc. who take the news and up the production value by infusing their personalities and commentary. Despite the crass name this is a valuable service. Good storytellers are the bridge between the dry academic work of historians, journalists, scientists, philosophers, etc. and people outside their respective fields.
tl;dr news isn’t art and can’t be judged by the same measures.
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.
> Our hypothesis was simple. If the AES machine consistently gave high scores to machine generated gibberish, we could surmise that 1) the construct being measured by the machines is not an essential component of human communication; and 2) students could be taught similar strategies to achieve high scores on computer scored writing tests by sprinkling their prose with long meaningless sentences composed of pretentious and irrelevant words.
> Our greatest surprise was how easy it was to fool all of the machines. We succeeded on our first try, demonstrating that rather than being elegant and complex manifestations of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, these engines could best be characterized as crude stupid machines.
EDIT (an example):
> We have now used the Babel Generator over twenty times to generate essays for the site, which, when submitted, receive top scores with comments such as articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task and sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically” for essays that read like this following opening paragraph:
> Careers with corroboration has not, and in all likelihood never will be compassionate, gratuitous, and disciplinary. Mankind will always proclaim noesis; many for a trope but a few on executioner. A quantity of vocation lies in the study of reality as well as the area of semantics. Why is imaginativeness so pulverous to happenstance? The reply to this query is that knowledge is vehemently and boisterously contemporary.
https://lesperelman.com/writing-assessment-robo-grading/babe...
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.
Really? I have difficulties understanding this. Is it because it is interesting for the kids through its shock value and manageable length? But this then looks to me like declaring ketchup to be vegetables so enough veggies are eaten at the canteen.
I liked reading in high school and most of the 19th and 18th century works I read bored me to tears and I probably ended up at least partly just reading the Cliff Notes. Today, I expect I would go to Wikipedia.
One of big goals teachers and schools are having currently is to make at least some kids like reading enough so they do it.
For the latter it’s because issues students deal with in school directly parallel those in the story.
You can find that situation in so many places in modern culture that there's no point listing any, it's like looking for air.
Semicolons, colons, and dashes, are rarely used now days.
Heck I am impressed when I see a dash properly used, I myself cannot lay claim to such knowledge. I am almost 100% certain that their usage was not taught to me in either school or college.
The reason why I think it most generally applies to “business writing” is because this area is most likely to value efficiency over others.
I don’t think it’s meant to say business folk should write like Hemingway, but that Hemingway is the most popular writer in this style.
Agreed. The general style values simple sentences which helps reading speed and comprehension, especially for audiences that don't share your native language. And it reduces fluff. Adverbs, for example, generally don't help make a point in business writing - data does.
See the example in that last sentence? I snuck a premise instead of stating it as a hypothesis or providing data to support it. At best that causes confusion for the reader and at worst it can mislead people that aren't carefully watching out for pitfalls like that.
A premise is a hypothesis. We don't explicitly tag all our premises; it's up to the reader to decide if they agree with the premises.
>We don't explicitly tag all our premises
True but we should aim to tag more of them in business writing. It's helpful to clearly state them so 1. You as the writer are crystal clear on the assumptions you're making, and 2. if there's any disagreement on premises you can resolve it before you spend any time discussing which course of action to take.
I pasted some excerpts from a paper I was reading and it gave the 'Post-Graduate' reading level. Does not mean it's bad writing, just hard to read (it's probably inevitable at that level).
It's probably a great tool for daily work, some people at my workplace used Grammarly, but it's paid, so this could be a good alternative.
And any writer who uses such a tool for validation is unlikely to be a good judge of writing to begin with.
Passive voice in narration is ... strange most of the time. It kicks the reader out of the situation, like Out-of-body experience, only it is an Out-of-book experience.
"John was killed by the assassins, his body was later discovered by a cleaning lady, carried out by morticians and dissected by pathologists."
It is pretty hard to feel any emotions around this almost technically cold description. A sentence like this could have come from a police dossier.
I am not a friend of software validation tools in this regard, though. Capturing the essence of beauty in words isn't a solved problem.
Slavs in general tend to struggle with "a/an/the" in English, because most Slavic languages lack articles. Out of the entire language family, only Bulgarian uses definite articles.
Articles feel unnatural to me, too. I got used to them, but in a similar way that one gets used to a prosthetic arm: you can do things, but it feels mechanic and distant.
Just like the passive voice, then?
*mechanical
"The assassins killed John, the cleaning lady discovered his body later, the morticians carried him out and the pathologists dissected him."
It is better, though not massively so. It's tighter. (Personally I'd break it into four sentences, but that's just me. I also would have used an Oxford comma, for that matter.)
The real problem is that the passive voice can be used for:
"John was killed, his body was later discovered, carried out, and dissected".
It's definitely punchy, and as the beginning of a thriller novel its vagueness could be exciting. But any place else you're left mostly with questions. It would be terrible in a newspaper account. And in an actual police report, it would sound like somebody was covering something up.
It hated it.
I agree, Hemingway is a useful tool for editing, but it's not any kind of authority on what "good" or "bad" writing is. It's great for reducing your word count during final edit, but that's about it.
What Bee said really resonated with me. I used to be a stickler for grammar rules and "proper" English, but as I've progressed in life I've come to realize that those rules are all secondary. All that really matters is that you are understood in the way you want to be understood.
Grammar rules help educate people about common idioms and structures so that they can understand others and be understood themselves. Additionally, by following a certain set of grammatical conventions, you can change the way you are perceived. By ignoring the rules, one might be seen as erudite and sophisiticated. OTOH u dont always want to seem stuckup :)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/
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.
When you think about it, we don't even know what knowledge is--what is it to posses (can it even be possessed?) the 'essence of knowledge'? Kinda makes you wonder if knowledge is nothing but the 'spiralcy study' of inevitable and ineffable Death--If all was known, could we really claim anything was ever truly alive?
I think it also helps that it is a weekly publication, which regularizes the sensationalist events of the day.