Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

An interesting aspect of collecting all these space stories in one place is that it allows you quickly confirm how many conform to the same science-journalism template: an extended human-interest story that doesn't start dribbling bits of science until many paragraphs in. Even when the focus of the article is a human's role, the writer follows the formula of telling a compelling anecdote rather than actually delivering important facts.

"In early February, Gwynne Shotwell arrived in Saudi Arabia for a bit of last-minute cleanup...."

"Kathleen Howell never aspired to walk on the moon. When she watched the first lunar landing as a teenager in 1969, she was more intrigued by the looping route that brought the Apollo 11 astronauts from Earth to the Sea of Tranquility and back..."

"On July 18, outside the West Texas town of Van Horn, hundreds of Blue Origin employees and their families and friends gathered to watch the New Shepard rocket blast off toward the edge of space...."

"The chicken sandwich has to get to space. This is what everyone at World View Enterprises Inc. was thinking as they set to work in the predawn hours of June 29, 2017, at the Page Municipal Airport in Arizona....

"Shou-Ching Jaminet, a molecular biologist and former researcher at Harvard Medical School, spent almost a year preparing an experiment for her small biotech startup, Angiex, to study the effects of weightlessness on a potential cancer drug. By June she was nervous with anticipation,..."

Does no one else get sick of this? I would love more inverted-pyramid coverage of science.

It's because research has discovered that people care about single, individual stories; especially those they can relate. So stories like this are how they capture people not already interested in the topics' interest. You see this everywhere. It's not "see this home get remodeled" it's "hear the story of this family and how remodeling their home changed their life", not "bake an awesome cupcake" but "while Betty bakes let's see her family at home and how her mum is doing". Most people just don't connect with big picture ideas or raw data.

I wonder what research that was. I hate that kind of stuff.

I’m noticing sci shows are also trying to insert way too much interpersonal drama for my tastes too. I had to stop watching travelers in season two even though I loved season one.

That's an explanation but not a justification. People like celebrity gossip too, but newspapers feel a duty (due to both external social pressure and an internal code) to not include updates on the opinion of the Kardashians as part of their war coverage. Although the upteenth description of a random postdoc's laboratory life (an example used elsewhere in this thread) seems less trashy than the Kardashians, I think they have similar news value.

It is a justification. If newspapers were a public good, they could afford to write pieces that didn't necessarily land well with the public, but had more substance around the science.

While newspapers don't include the Kardashians in the war coverage, they DO include the Kardashians. War is very different from Science - it is straightforward, exciting to read about, and has an immediate human interest. Science is none of those things.

You aren't disputing whether it's a justification, you're disputing my empirical claim that newspapers leave the Kardashians out of war coverage for principled reasons. But we can just pick some other news topic that is also dry like science yet newspaper feel duty-bound (or shame-avoidance-driven) to not enhance with celebrity gossip. (Otherwise you're claiming that duty/shame play no role whatsoever in news coverage, which I think is clearly false and am not interested in arguing about.)

Hopefully my tone didn't make it seem like I was spoiling for a fight - I don't know of a dry topic that's not enhanced with stories about the people involved in mainline journalism.

That's also not what I'm saying. I'm saying there are certain types of enhancements (Kardashians) which are considered unbecoming to discuss in certain serious topics (supreme court decisions). I think the list of eschewed enhancements for science should be expanded to include the type discussed in my top level comment.

There is probably a balance in how much unbecoming things can you leave out of your newspaper before its readership drops so low that it goes bankrupt.

>That's an explanation but not a justification. People like celebrity gossip too, but newspapers feel a duty (due to both external social pressure and an internal code) to not include updates on the opinion of the Kardashians as part of their war coverage.

Well, they don't include the opinion of the Kardashians in the science articles either. Just the stories and opinions of people involved.

And inversely, the media also write their war coverage in the form of human interest stories.

I'm suggesting that most of these human-interest angles on science should be considered just as un-newsworthy as the Kardashians. The breakfast cereal eaten by the scientist and Kim Kardashian are equally non-relevant, even if the former seems justifiable on first glance.

I am not 100% this is true. people want things narrowed down to as little text as possible, consider the fact that many people read headlines and stop there.

when talking to a writer i knew, he would always do this type of dress up with stories. to him, these were the important parts, not the big picture or raw data. it was part of 'the art form'.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

Yeah, I don't like it at all either. But I attribute that to the fact that I've read so many stories in that style popping up on HN, NYT, WSJ or Economist. There's probably nothing wrong with that style in itself and it does add a bit of flourish to what might otherwise be a very short article. But it does become grating if you're exposed to articles like it so often that it seems like a rote pattern.

Sometimes when I read reporting like this it makes me think that human language isn't so complex as to be intractable. For all our mastery of the subtleties and nuances of human communication, it appears that (for the most part), our most widely disseminated writing is formulaic and templated. It strikes me that this sort of writing is like the four chords that virtually all popular music is written in.

When you start to see it so often there almost seems to be something sing-songey about this kind of writing. It's not just the narrative structure, use of in media res, or focus on characters instead of facts - it's also the words themselves, which seem to be used to construct a finite number of idioms and phrases arranged in a very usual pattern.

I suppose every sophisticated thing in the world is mundane when you're watched it long enough to see a pattern. TVTropes gives me the same feeling about entertainment. I'm also of the opinion that this style of writing is mostly disagreeable for people who just want the technical content. But to be frank, there are very good periodicals for Quanta Magazine for that kind of purpose. Popular journalism isn't really intended for that.

> add a bit of flourish to what might otherwise be a very short article

Brevity would save time and be easier on everyone's scarce attention.

I agree, but that's not what everyone wants. I don't think they necessarily should want it, either. If writing in this style gets more people to read then so much the better - the complaints about it in this thread are, if we're going to be fully self-aware about it, a very tiny and unrepresentative microcosm compared to the total readership in play.

We're not all running around as hyperrational machine gods :). What matters to some people doesn't matter to others, and it's probably very hard to optimize widely disseminated content for accessibility, enjoyability and depth of technical coverage. I might go so far as to say you need to pick two.

The problem every news source uses this format.

Remove the fluff and you might get a single page of 'major' science news per month. Sure it would be a little dry but it would also be something I would want to read.

Exactly, I find myself (unconsciously) skimming the first sentences of each paragraph of these long articles until the actual content starts. It feels like having to sit through the first 5 secs of a YT ad before you can skip it.

All because the writers get paid by the word, i suppose?

> All because the writers get paid by the word, i suppose

I don't suppose that. I'd say it's because writing has more levels to it than a Wikipedia style information dump. Just like software has more elements than just spelling out the desired behavior.

If we're going with software analogy, then articles like this one are journalistic equivalent of Java EE-style bloat, or Electron apps.

Well don't ever pick up an issue of the New Yorker. It'll put you in a coma.

Not everyone's attention is scarce. I think it's a symptom of the digital age. Too much consumption on computers with constant interruptions and instant gratification.

For people who feel like they should be reading about more science but find straight-science bland, I don't begrudge them having access to journalism that makes it easier for them to consume. My chief concern is that this style of writing is overwhelmingly dominant in all major outlets. You can find some niche science-heavy writing, but they are so unpopular that they don't have any of the resources of the major newspapers.

> ...so many stories in that style popping up on HN, NYT, WSJ or Economist

Incidentally, this has not been my experience with the Economist. I find their science reporting to be the highest quality (both in correctness and in directness) of any of the major outlets. They are the only ones that have written about my field several times and always gotten it basically right.

I didn’t mean to say the Economist’s reporting isn’t high quality. It’s probably my favorite news publication. The writing is definitely more brief and focused than that of the WSJ and NYT. But it still has elements of this in play. Consider, for example, the first paragraph of You break it, you own it from the most recent issue’s Middle East and Africa section:

THE scene in the centre of Afrin, a Kurdish city in north-western Syria, hardly inspires confidence in the future. A destroyed statue of a mythical Kurdish hero is a reminder of the plunder of the city after its capture earlier this year by Arab and Turkoman rebels backed by Turkish tanks, from Kurdish rebels. The teenage son of one of the Arab rebels peddles cigarettes, a rifle across his knees. Another rebel directs traffic. Turkey argues it saved Afrin from terrorists and boasts of opening schools and hospitals. Residents are not exactly brimming with gratitude. “The Turkish soldiers are behaving decently,” says a Kurdish merchant. “But the bearded ones are big trouble,” he adds, referring to Islamist militants. “They’ve stolen so much.”

I don’t believe it’s bad writing at all. In fact it’s rather nice. But it’s in the same category as what we’re talking about. The key is that this isn’t a science or technology story, so this kind of setting-the-scene and world-building don’t detract from the technical content.

Yea, my comment was only about the Economist's science coverage.

Well while I have you, it looks like your field is physics. Do you mind mentioning a few other publications which do a particularly good job of covering physics? The only other one I regularly read is Quanta Magazine, but my background is more math and CS.

I wish I had good recommendations for you. Quanta can be quite good, but it misses sometimes. Most coverage of fundamental physics, especially theory, fails (for obvious reasons) to provide the key context that progress in the field is very slow and getting slower.

There are a few excellent specialist blogs, like Resonaances for particle physics,

http://resonaances.blogspot.com/

but they are not very accessible to outsiders. Sean Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Peter Woit are pretty good and accessible

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/ http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

but they aren't neutral; that's fine since they are personal blogs, but it can be difficult for laymen to get an objective picture of the field.

Why is progress in the field getting slower?

Roughly, because the experiments have gotten too expensive, so new data is coming in too slowly.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

>overwhelmingly dominant in all major outlets. You can find some niche science-heavy writing, but they are so unpopular that they don't have any of the resources of the major newspapers.

What sort of resources? NASASpaceflight.com is one of the best space news sites around (along with SpaceNews.com) and it does it on subscription revenue for a private section of its forum (yes, a phpBB-style forum) and a smidge of ad revenue.

Meanwhile, CNN has all the resources in the world and this is what we get: https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/10222467528612823...

I think you're speaking to my point? The higher quality reporting is rarer and stuck with way fewer resources.

I guess my question is: what's the downside to not having those resources?

I predict NASASpaceflight.com and SpaceNews.com would give you a laundry list of types and depths of coverage they would provide if given only a bit more money. You don't see all the good stuff you're not getting.

> Does no one else get sick of this?

I roll my eyes every time I see such stories and look for a more technical coverage of the topic somewhere else.

I suspect that's a difference between thing- vs. people-oriented readers. I assume the former are in the minority.

It's not so much that I'm oriented toward things as that I just hate people...

I just hate people

Wow, that's rich.

After some decades I discovered that physics too is about people. Social aspect is inescapable. That didn't turn me off, but taught to appreciate the narrative aspect as integral and thus maybe a part of the beauty. Not necessarily in the watered down journalism (which is fine, as a scientist I'm not the target audience) but the fact that the big narratives that harnessed collective resources previously were just that: big narratives. That was one of the functions and enablers of the Space Program itself, not sustained nor repeated since, to the determent of our capability. And that's what bystanders look for in science. (Not just them, if your social status and self-esteem hinges on you being a scientist, that's also taking part in narrative that enables you to thrive despite hating people).

If you really just hate people, then take example in Teller - he also knew the power of storytelling but just used it mercilessly.

Easy there, Hoss. The ellipsis was intended to mark my comment as a joke.

I made the joke on you.

I don't know. I'm a pretty extroverted guy, love communicating with people and performing live in front of an audience, with a lot of social connections - and yet, when I want to read about rocket technology, I'd rather read about the technology, with detailed illustrations of dissected engines and graphs and all the interesting details, rather than read yet another description of a yet another postdoc's day in the lab.

> I'd rather read about the technology, with detailed illustrations of dissected engines and graphs and all the interesting details, rather than read yet another description of a yet another postdoc's day in the lab.

I personally like both, but I wouldn't go seeking hard tech and science from Bloomberg Businessweek. It's a good publication, but hard, detailed science is not it's MO, and never was. It's like a series of pointers to hard science subjects (if that happens to be among the subjects) for business minds and investors. It covers politics as well, but it's stated purpose is how these matters reflect on the business world, not overly concerned with details of policy unless they affect the subject of business. Occasionally they have more hard-hitting pieces, but for the most part, that's what it is. I think that's a good thing.

The many people decrying "watered down journalism" and that there are too few technical details here, are really missing the forest for the trees.

I'd love to read on the busines side of these things, too - anything but the personal stories, please.

> I suspect that's a difference between thing- vs. people-oriented readers. I assume the former are in the minority.

Might be also because you know that most of the "people-oriented" content in such articles is bullshit, misrepresented to create story progression? That it has negative educational value? Are people who like such articles aware of this?

I think calling this science coverage is a stretch (except for the cancer one). The new era of rockets lies at the intersection of business and engineering.

I do tire of anecdotal journalism, but if it belongs anywhere it's in biographical profiles like the Shotwell piece and in magazines generally. It gets old quick when actual news buries the lede.

I always thought that it was just an attempt at making the piece look more literary and less dry, it's especially common in long form journalism. You want a protagonist, acts, a resolution. It's news but also a novel. I think many people also want to be able to relate and empathize with the character in the story and don't like very technical pieces, see for instance 99% of Hollywood blockbusters. You want romance and tension, not cold sci-fi.

I don't mind it too much personally but I'm sure that a lot of the time many of these details are over-emphasized or maybe sometimes completely made up to paint a more vivid picture. That's fine for a novel but not so great for a journalistic endeavor.

> it's especially common in long form journalism

And always has been. This is tradition as much as anything-- and as with other traditions, some of it probably just boils down to how brains and cultures currently work.

It's pop science coverage in Bloomberg, for the layman who has no interest in space exploration outside of the article.

Articles filled with technical detail would bore the reader.

If you want actual comprehensive, tech orientated coverage, there are other more suitable publications out there.

Can you recommend any publications?

For the space industry, The Space Review[0] is a fantastic, regularly updated collection of essays.

[0] http://thespacereview.com/

This looks good. And double points for having a simple site with RSS feed.

NASA Spaceflight is pretty good.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/

I hate this kind of articles. I've clicked to read about some new, exciting scientific/tech discovery, and the first paragraphs I have to read have no relation whatsoever to what I was expecting. Those paragraphs look like an attempt the author made to show off his writing skills as if he were a novelist or something. Too many times I thought "to the point already!" when reading those paragraphs.

I was raised on the inverted pyramid, too, and like it. However, the benefit of easy scanning was secondary to its main design driver, manual (and literal) cut and past. They needed to guarantee that they could cut a story basically anywhere to fit the layout, and the continuation would be on a different page, with more ads. The “internet ramble” is also designed with ad revenue in mind; the reader has to read and scroll through ads to get to the part they actually care about. Its indulgent meandering is maddening, and degrades journalism and storytelling.

> Does no one else get sick of this?

One paragraph of that insufferable nonsense, and as a rule, I'm out.

Yeah, people keep saying they do this because of some "research" but I suspect that whatever research that was is very wrong. Here's what doesn't add up: the story of someone's life and activities is only truly interesting for a small fraction of the population, maybe one out of 50 people. So if you're going to write an article about a newsworthy scientific accomplishment, what are the chances that the people involved also happen to have a compelling life story? Pretty low. It's obvious to a numerate person that the first several paragraphs are there for no good reason, yet the author insists on wasting our time anyway, so we get annoyed and find something else to do.

> what are the chances that the people involved also happen to have a compelling life story? Pretty low.

Fear not. Journalists know that the way around this is to cherry-pick quotes, add some weasel world, and misrepresent the reality so that that person's life story suddenly sounds like a script for a Hollywood movie.

> the story of someone's life and activities is only truly interesting for a small fraction of the population, maybe one out of 50 people.

I think you're wrong here. Most people relate more to people than to gadgets. We're the exception here, not the rule. HN readers want the facts, but for the general population, the human interest angle improves the article. It gives them a reason to care.

A bit late, but I see now that I biffed on expressing myself here, and I don't blame you all for thinking I'm wrong. What I meant was that one out of 50 people's life stories are interesting, not that only one out of 50 people find life stories interesting.

Always remember. Half of the world has an IQ under 100. Not everything that appeals to a software engineer will appeal to the masses. I have friends who think reading something like this means they "did the research".

It's pathetic, but it's the modern age where all knowledge is accessable but very few know how to get it. Most people think they're smart and are wrong. So accessible sciencey-feeling things are popular.

My theory: when you have to crank out several articles a day to pay the rent, you tend to need a formula to go by. This formula is more suitable for some kinds of stories than others, but what I know about the economics of journalism suggests they don't pay enough to spend much time thinking about who the audience would be for _this_ story, and what that audience would appreciate reading.

> telling a compelling anecdote rather than actually delivering important facts

I worked in this industry, including with some of the companies named. Business is about people. The human aspects are important facts. If you just want the science, consider subscribing to science journals' e-mail lists.

Science in and of itself is really only interesting to a select few people. Science as it relates to the lives of real people is far more interesting to a much wider group of people. Even after spending my entire adult life in engineering, I'd rather have the latter, TBH.

I definitely do. That's why I just skimmed this article, quickly looking if there are any hyperlinks or keywords suggesting something new. I found just this[0]. Total time spent on article: 10 seconds.

And people complain millennials have too short an attention span to read long-form. I suggest that maybe it's because long-form articles today have incredibly low information density, and are generally a waste of time.

(The article had pretty pictures, though.)

--

[0] - https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moon-to-mars/lunar-outpost

I miss that too. But it seems accepted wisdom that details about science or technology are boring and have to be wrapped in some human interest story. I am now listening to podcasts like Omega Tau where people talk about the technology and not just about people.

Just to be clear : I am OK with reading about the backgrounds and motivations of people but please don't skip the tech part.

It's like the funnel intro format everyone gets hammered into writing while in school. I never cared for it, and now have to filter it out when reading articles. It's pure noise rather than adding to the content.

I'm equally annoyed at many of those but Gwynne Shotwell is fundamentally an interesting person who's integral to the workings of SpaceX and it was good to have an article about her.

I think Gwynne Shotwel is super interesting and have even briefly blogged about her. That doesn't mean what she had for breakfast yesterday is interesting; that's just a fun distraction.

This is a trend everywhere, not just in science journalism. Everybody wants to be the New York Times Magazine.

Somebody please build a news distiller that extracts the facts from such articles.

Well, to be blunt, you don't have a story without a protagonist and a problem. And if you don't have a story, you don't have a reader. If you don't have readers, then there isn't much point in writing.

So you don't see much popular journalism without a protagonist and a problem. I dunno if that's good or bad, but that's what we have and there are reasons for that situation.

> Well, to be blunt, you don't have a story without a protagonist and a problem.

What if the protagonist is an object? I find the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is quite a mover of things! And that evolution guy has many fantastic, quirky stories to tell.

And I often read science-fiction for the interesting world-building. The people-shenanigans are just a vehicle to show the world to me.

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