When did writing in major newspapers become so bad?

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

https://j-source.ca/article/copy-editors-laid-off-more-than-...

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/by-dismantlin...

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!

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.

In a way this is fantastic, we shouldn't have two or three newspaper owners running almost all media under the vestedge of prestige.

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.

I still remember a horrifying 2-page (gasp!) paper from 5th grade where the requirements where so stringent (The 5th sentence has to be a thesis statement! Start each paragraph with a transition. Each paragraph has to support the thesis.), writing it mostly meant plugging in key words in the template like a mad-lib. And it really messed up my writing for a while.

When trying to convey nuanced topics, I often feel like a Neanderthal (no offense I guess?) trying to bang adjectives together hoping for meaning to appear. I think a lot of the stuff I was taught about composition and sentence structures was worse than not learning anything. And I wish I could go back and learn from an actual writer instead of a teacher.

I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill".

I don't want to be That Guy, but I've also noted a huge increase in terrible, incredible examples of the need for the Serial Comma, all by clueless editors. One big one was last week in the WP:

> Jackson’s former colleagues vastly disapproved of his conduct and leadership within the White House Medical Unit, including screaming, belittling colleagues and fits of rage, which demoralized nurses and doctors, the report found. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/03/03/...)

So what we've learned is that Jackson's conduct and leadership somehow included rounding up colleagues who screamed and belittled. And the presence of these horrible colleagues, plus his fits of rage, demoralized nurses and doctors...

But this time I'm a little amused.

There's a lot of in-depth commentary by non-journalists about journalism. When non-software engineers comment about software development, or non-physicists comment about physical science there's usually much more ire for the lack of accuracy. And further, Substack (is that what's used instead of Medium now?) always seems to be posted with some kind of critique of every other journalistic outlet or platform. I guess that's how the new outlets get started now: react or rebel against something else? It worked for Canadaland and they've grown into their own so maybe it'll run a good course.

But I think the article isn't good. Why make such a sweeping statement when you're really only assessing an article or two in one or two publications?

Why treat all writing in a given publication as a common sum? They are editorialized and curated, but certainly not monolithic.

It's so dismissive and hand-wavy that I can hardly believe it's ranked this highly on HN and I must only assume it's because everyone everywhere seems to love to pile on a few things these days, and they always end up popular: how "bad" modern journalism is, how much artists should be paid (usually nothing), and any even remotely politically-charged subject. And each time, the story or the comments seem to be empty of compassion or even base-level empathy and understanding.

But I digress...

Basically, he pastes part of a New Yorker article in Hemingway, a tool that evaluates the reading level of a text and flags it if it's more complex than a ninth grade reading level. Spoiler: the New Yorker piece has too many big words and more complex sentences than what you'd write to target a ninth grade audience. He then does this for a longer New York Times think piece, also written in a New Yorker-like style.

What do you expect? These are not news articles, these are think pieces, even though one of them is published in the New York Times. They're supposed to be literary, which sometimes means having words more complex than a ninth grade level and sentences longer than what Hemingway would write.

If you tried this on an actual news article, where the style is often simpler, you might get a different result.

- 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.)

> I have so many questions. > Is the person a writer for New Yorker? Is The Drunken Canal somehow related to the New Yorker? What is The Drunken Canal? How was she “regretting” something at that point in time? Vocally or otherwise? What publication was being stored in those unmarked white newspaper boxes? Wait, is The Drunken Canal a publication?

> Something like this would be more clear:

It's also more boring. There are people who like things to be a bit more entangled, as real life often is, and that's what that writing caters for.

--

People like this guy who seem to be believe there's only one correct way to write, who actually believe you can put writing that is supposed to be pushing the envelope into "an app that identifies poor writing" and use the results piss me off. Grammarly and similar have their uses of course, but I dread the day people actually use it to clamp down on anything that's slightly different than the norm (as this guy is doing), and everyone will be forced to write in a style that conforms with what an ML model says is okay. It is my personal nightmare.

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.

He attempts to justify this ludicrous opinion by using "Hemingway", a presumably-ML-powered robot copy editor app, to prove that this magazine is "hard to read".

There, I saved you ten exasperating minutes.

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.

[0] https://twitter.com/nytimesGLOOM

Edit: ninja'd.

Back when newspaper content came mostly from reporters who went out into the real world, newspapers had "Rewrite". Reporters would phone in stories, and Rewrite would rewrite them. They'd rewrite the copy in house style, and maybe look up some file info to add to the story. Then stories were passed to editors, who would edit them, putting copy-editing marks on them. Finally they went to the composing room, where typesetters typing on Linotypes would apply the editing corrections and often catch spelling errors. The copy of each story was tweaked by at least three people.

Now, it's direct from author's keyboard to publication. The only intervention is spell check.

The first jumped off the page at me:

"She is involved in The Drunken Canal, a regional print publication based New York City"

This is also bad writing:

“Honor Levy was conflicted about pulling her piece from The Drunken Canal, a regional New York print paper she began last year. She had several short stories published in the New Yorker, but this felt different.”

Regional is a redundant descriptor if New York is included. Just saying "regional" would make the sentence flow better. "Print paper" also doesn't have meaning, it's something the author made up.

It's rare to find a news story at all these days that reports something as

'X happened on this day. A and B parties were involved. Y was the consequence of X.'

Instead news.is always reported more like.

'&adjective, &adjective X was the most &loaded_descriptor event ever. The &negative_adjective, &dehumanizing_term A's, &negative_adjective &negative_verb the &positive_adjective B's. Everybody should hate the &negative_adjective A's.'

- 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.

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.

I generally agree with his thesis, but:

Scoring articles with the Hemingway app is a red herring that distracts from the point he was making. Hemingway just measures sentence complexity as a stand-in for clarity of writing. But, the issue with excerpts like the one above was not that they were too complex, but that they left out the context and explanations which a reporter should usually prioritize over style. Dropping text into Hemingway is easy, but it's clearly meaningless in this case, and gives people an opportunity to dismiss his thesis by quibbling with the application.

That sentence was probably too long, but perhaps you understand what I mean anyway. If this already exists, please inform me where.

It's all about speed. The way articles would work would be that they'd be posted immediately by the author, and edited after. Sometimes they wouldn't actually get edited (after all, it was already out there and the views were already trending downward after an hour). And at best, the editing would just be spelling and grammar rather than structural, because you can't change a live blog post that much.

So, the result was first drafts of articles were basically the final draft.

I always hated it, but I don't know what else can be done? Google and Twitter and others give a huge boost to the first one with the story, and there's no much reward for doing it right.

Which is tragic, given how failure prone almost every Federal grand program has been in the long run, from the war on drugs, to the war in Iraq, to housing subsidies, to subsidized student debt.

> But her friend and editor, Claire Banse, also 23, had told her the paper had already hit its quota on the word “retarded” and she’d objected. (What else rhymes with “departed”?)

Author of post:

> Wait, what does it mean to have a quota on a word? Are they not using that word enough or are using it too much?

Can someone explain how "already hit its quota on the word" could mean they are not using that word enough?

And even past that, how could you think when taking into account the context of "retarded" make you think "hit its quota" means there was desire for more use of "retarded" in an article?

I am confused on how this person is confused

Hackernews wise, I have spent hours searching for a copy of the old UNIX writer’s workbench project, but haven’t found it anywhere. From what I’ve read these tools can do much more than the “Hemingway” tool used in the article.

> 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.

Before, when the articles had to fit a particular surface on paper, there were rules to write the article in a way that it could be comfortably cut after any paragraph and still make sense. So the first paragraph would contain a high level overview summary, then the details would pile up.

Of course it's harder and more time consuming to write like that, but it avoids the overly embellished style that many internet publications (be it newspapers or blogs) have nowadays.

https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...

In short, they write "posturetalk" over reporting news. This is why these articles are written this way. It is not to inform, it is to peacock.

The Washington Post has for many years been well thought of. Back in the 1960s, Ben Bagdikian said that the problem with The Washington Post is that nobody edited it. Benjamin Bradlee hired him to do so, but he left after a couple of years. By the time I started reading the Post a few years later, I constantly ran into sloppy, badly edited writing.

The nature of Journalism has completely changed with the advent of the internet. You don't require as many people on the ground, and the access afforded to high resource high prestige outlets is not very useful. Opinions, realtime updates and news is broadcasted straight through tools like Twitter. Information is decentralized and free. Thus, Journalists role has now become to exclusively broker power. The narrative is all that matters. Everyone knows the news anyway.

This is where new media began spiralling. Pushing narratives is the only value you can provide, but the power needed to get buyin for the narratives was lent by a monopoly over facts, that isn't there anymore.

note: The collapse of the NYT specifically is rooted in an entirely separate generational struggle. This does not address it.

It's hard to assume good faith here.

"Uses", presumably. But the quoted bits had exactly one. Either the writer or the software doesn't know what passive voice is (or both!) or he is holding back the other seven.

This style of writing seems very deliberate. I doubt it was not intended to be just this way.

Cherry-picking ten bad sentences from tens of thousands written per day seems like a long-tail metric or anecdotal at best.

> Only around one or fewer earthquakes of 8.0-magnitude or greater occur each year.

I imagine it’s hard to write cleanly and get copy editing when everything has to be online 15 minutes ago.

Until some semblance of Fairness Doctrine returns, this crappy journalism shall continue.

But without an Editor, writing went downhill and is now circling the drain.

Journalists are now just copywriters; optimizing for SEO and Google's spiders.

Poor old hyphen.

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.

Compare and contrast the average newspaper article written in say 1921 compared to now. The difference in comprehension level is pretty glaring.