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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Mad offtopic unimportant nitpick here.

I'm so extremely put off when an author spends three paragraphs building up to an exciting climax, hits enter enter and then writes "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949". I had to skim half the article to find out how the story continued.

Anecdotally, this strikes me as a uniquely American thing to do (or, at least, I've not read a single Dutch article pulling this trick), is there any point to it? Is it just something about eyeballs and ads? Do they teach this stuff in journalism school? Maybe Americans are immune to it because of the enormous amounts of "build up, build up, build up, almost there..... Let's continue after the messages! ^_^" on childhood TV?

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Author of the article here. It's definitely not about ads. On principle, we don't host ads on Damn Interesting, and we never have.

We aim for narrative non-fiction, to tell a true story that keeps the reader intrigued throughout. We've found over the years that stories with a good "hook" or "teaser" seem to be best received by readers. We've also found that people want some background on the people/places they are reading about, and this often requires us to jump back in time after the teaser to fill in the relevant information.

If your goal is just to extract the basic bones of the story rather than to be entertained for a while, you probably won't like this article, nor the others in our catalog. Our approach to storytelling is not for everybody. And that's okay with us--trying to please everyone is the short road to clickbait town.

Thank you, author. I actually like the style - it is entertaining.

And in fact, the guys back story was almost the highlight really. Laying himself off to collect unemployment ... what a piece of work.

FWIW, I thought it was a highly entertaining read and well written. This style of introduction followed by a 'rewind to the beginning' is pretty common in my experience, particularly in magazine articles including longform newspaper pieces, here in the UK. I don't know why anyone would associate it with clickbait - I find that strange.

If I were being hyper critical, I'd suggest maybe some kind of visual section break, like one of those stylised wavy lines - I have no idea what they're called!

Would you prefer the article to begin "Michael Larson was born in the small town of Lebanon, Ohio in 1949. Although he was generally regarded as creative and intelligent, he had an inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over gainful employment. One of his earliest exploits was in middle school ..."?

No, you probably would stop reading after two lines of that. Because who cares about this ordinary-sounding guy? We have to know why he's interesting, first.

Or would you prefer to not know about Larson's background, and just get the exciting part of the story? Maybe you would, but many people would be left feeling dissatisfied by that and halfway through they would be asking, "So, who is this guy Larson, where did he come from? What's the context behind all this crazy stuff he did?"

Organizing a narrative is a difficult logistical challenge. Could you do it better?

Yes. It's to the point.

I would prefer they at least tell us whether he cheated or got lucky. It's an awful cliffhanger that serves no purpose. This isn't a Dan Brown novel.

I don't know where (for example) Mark Zuckerberg was born, nor when, and nor do I care.

I know the parts which are relevant to Zuckerberg's story: that he was likely born in the US, and was likely around 20 when he founded Facebook.

A journalistic interpretation of Larson's childhood is speculative non-sense. The journalist was not there, and does not even cite who thought Larson was "creative and intelligent".

It doesn't add anything (for me), except that the journalist presenting themself as an omniscient narrator makes the article read as a fictional story.

Zuckerberg was a child of privilege raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the US and attended an extremely elite private high school. That's relevant.

Absolutely.

(I felt safe assuming that without even looking it up - if that wasn't precisely the case, it would be part of his mythos)

The simplest solution favoured by European magazines and newspapers is to put factoids away from the main body of the article. They can be put into separate text boxes, or added to illustration descriptions. The laziest illustration would be a photo of some generic landmark view from that town, but they can also try to find a photo of his school (there are about five schools in that Lebanon, right?), for example. Notice that they already have a photo with his girlfriend with a single sentence description, they could move a half of tangent about his personal life in it.

The harder solution is to try to find a context which will make that factoid more interesting. For example, "Shaker Curse". Imagine an article telling you that everybody born there is cursed to never prosper, and now your mind is wondering, did Michael Larson broke the alleged curse, or affirmed it?

The hardest solution I had seen was an entire separate encyclopedia with biographies of people mentioned in the news crosslinked with a news article.

Absolutely. Part of that sentence is quite captivating "he had an inexplicable preference for shady enterprises over gainful employment". You've piqued my interest, and now I actually care to investigate how this story might unfold.

I think the grandparent is talking about the tendency for writers to show all their cards in scene one and then retract them, saying "Aha! Got your attention, now instead of what I was previously describing, here's some mindless filler".

This seems to be a typical feature of "long-form journalism" [1]. This might be a typically American format? (As a Belgian, I also see this type of articles less often in our media.) I've grown to dislike it because it feels pseudo-intellectual: making articles longer with the implication that they must be of higher quality (especially in contrast to clickbait), but in reality, it often feels like the journalist is just fluffing up the text with irrelevant information. I think these articles are supposed to be read like a short story, but nonfictional, rather than as a factual account of what happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism

From what I can tell, the problem is that those first three paragraphs are a perfectly good introduction to a different article. Larson is obviously going to be a main character in this story, but there are strong signals that the article won't be primarily about Larson. Instead, it seems to be building up to a story about how the show went wrong and what the wider effects were. In particular, it's promising themes of themes of shock and incredulity.

The next four paragraphs deliver none of this, opting instead to make a study of Larson's character. The show itself, another major character, doesn't makes an appearance again until paragraph 8. The first hint at the foreshadowed themes doesn't show up until the end of paragraph 10, where "Bob Edwards was uneasy about Larson." and then not again until paragraph 14, where "Host Peter Tomarken became increasingly flabbergasted..."

From that point on, the article seems to match the tone of the introduction. The correct fix is probably to rework the introduction to include some of the themes present in the first half of the article. Maybe focus on themes of escalation, as the whole article is built as a slow, constant build-up of intensity.

This format is very common in long form journalism. New Yorker articles are a good example of this format.

First they have the hook, then they go back and tell the persons entire life story. I think the point is for you to get somewhat emotionally invested in the story, almost like reading a novel or short story instead of just reporting the facts.

Some people find it more enjoyable to read, or may find it easier to retain information in this format as you begin to get invested in the story.

On many mobile sites (amp?) an ad is inserted every screenful of text so the longer the text the more ads.

Not sure this is related but go look at english recipe sites. 10-15 screens of fluff to get to the recipe. It's clearly some kind of SEO or ad optimizing formula

I was complaining to my wife about this exact thing yesterday. Her reply: You do know we own like 20 printed cookbooks right? No ads in those...

Journalism school has been removed from the equation for most American (and probably beyond those borders) bloggers.

Articles occasionally get made into movies, and therefore have a huge incentive to be movie-like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_magazin...

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