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Comment by FatalLogic | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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)

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".

Yes. It's to the point.

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