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What is it with modern journalism that everything has to start with two screens of personal stories?

The article stands on its own without the story of a boy, and his father, and their ancestors, and personal experiences.

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It's like they are getting ideas from recipes. Want to know how to make muffins? My grandmother died and left me the recipe. She was a nice old lady, etc etc.

I know you're just kidding, but to the OP, this is from the magazine section. I haven't read the article yet, but sometimes at least, enjoy the occasional story in my news.

I think they're serious. Recipe websites make for great content farms as they naturally get page views that last for several minutes while requiring no creative writing skills for the recipe content. Prefixing the pages with some prose that the user has to skim through while searching for the start of the recipe affects engagement for the ads which monitor that.

It's actually pretty simple: people can relate to stories much more easily than to abstract ideas.

Today's journalists sometimes overdo it, though.

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