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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Something that I think is rarely discussed when this topic comes up is the loss of prestige. Working for The New York Times or The New Yorker used to have some weight with pretty much everyone in the country.

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

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It isn't just that journalism has become an ideological battleground. Even without the cultural warfare, once-mighty publications would still be seen as in decline. The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy. Due to the pressures of swiftly producing content that draws maximum clicks, journalists at even august publications are now forced to create articles little distinguishable from a minimum-wage content writer hired off some freelance platform.

There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Journalists have always chafed at limitations of space, but they are under even more pressure today to be concise and eschew subtleties and nuance. The same length as a traditional magazine article from a couple of decades ago, is now seen as a "long read", something for only a niche audience.

Because 99% of long articles are a waste of time that could be summarized in a sentence or two. This is why no one reads articles here or on Reddit, and just skims the comments instead.

I almost always at least skim an article before diving into the comments. Many times I will read the whole thing, especially if it is short, as this one is. I do believe that most probably don't do that. It's often possible to tell which commenters have read it and which haven't, i.e. if a comment mentions something not even present in the article, or if it mentions something clearly refuted in the article.

I think it's important to read the things you comment on, and I think it's important to expect others to do so as well. Ignorance is tolerated too much these days, especially considering that knowledge is easier to obtain now than ever before.

The number of commentators who have read the article decreases exponentially as a function of length.

A good case in point is the biggest ideas in Statistics paper that's hovered around the front page for a while.

A lot of long form articles are like online recipes though: A giant barely-related narrative about the subject’s home town and hobbies and life philosophies, and hidden within are the 5 lines showing ingredients and how to cook the food.

Perhaps this is why a lot of comment threads quickly become arguments about the first thing that springs to commenters' minds when they read the headline rather than what the article actually says.

Some forms of long articles are a form of entertainment. They appeal to a segment of society that enjoys long winded and meandering reads.

But those are different from long articles which pack a lot of content. Time magazine or Newsweek of yore.

The latter didn’t pad the stories with flowery language or add “texture” (things like describing the sofa someone is sitting in and the drapery or wainscoting, etc., that permeates a certain type of writing. That has its place, but not in journalism as much. Long journalism should add direct and proximate information not delve into atmospherics.

Long-form journalism has been written with an eye to "adding texture" for decades. Some of the most celebrated non-fiction writers of the last half-century—Tom Wolfe, David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson—followed in that tradition.

"In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has...

I’m not saying it doesn’t have its place. I just don’t want it in hard news and related journalism.

Sinatra is not a hard news subject. That would belong in Playboy or RollingStone or New Yorker.

Imagine a WWII article about any of the mustachioed protagonists and it meandered about their choice of whisker trimming and lifestyle in mountain retreats and seaside dachas instead of all the horrors they caused.

"Instead of" would certainly be bad. But the "textural details" of these long-form articles is the sort of experiential glue that can make the scene -- and the facts -- come alive in the mind of the reader. That makes them memorable and relatable, providing hooks to which the reader can attach their understanding. Like the difference between a getting-started guide and chapter one of a reference book -- they both have their place, but they're not the same thing.

As redler noted, you don't want "instead of," but depending on circumstance you might want "in addition to" -- although I think you're stacking the deck a little with your choice. :)

Also, you can invert that -- the story that seems to be about something relatively inconsequential can be a lens on more complex issues. Emily VanDerWerff at Vox is (at least to me) excellent at talking about society, culture and politics by talking about film and television.

To be clear, I don't want everything to sound like new journalism feature pieces, either, and I'm aware we're veering afield from the linked article's complaints. (I don't think I'm fully on board with that article's kvetching, but Ben Smith is definitely no Gay Talese.)

This will certainly fit your bill.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

Wow, what an awesome article. Thank you!

> The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy

Never forget this bias. It's the primary bias of most major news outlets. CNN wants you to keep watching CNN for more news, even if there isn't enough news to fill airtime, so they drag things out, bring on guests, and favor stories with the potential to keep you glued to your TV.

>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices.

Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it.

Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.

Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume.

I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.

> * Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect. *

Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode.

So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.

I'm not sure overall-length would be affected by "short attention span" -- it would be "entertainment spikes" or I suppose "average time between significant events". Perhaps the best term is pacing -- how fast does the story flow?

You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this.

So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc.

From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits.

I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".

>The issue is the modern ad-based internet economy.

Bingo. I honestly think modern "journalism" has more in common with marketing and search engine optimisation than traditional journalism. That's the sort of high-level view I've adopted to explain this decline.

I wrote my first and only substack bit about this last year and have been in two minds whether or not to continue with it.

https://benlumen.substack.com/p/thank-god-i-never-went-into-...

I'd argue that slightly more than half a century ago, journalism was largely a blue-collar job with blue-collar attitudes done by working & middle-class people. They saw the job as their responsibility to hold public figures to public account.

The prestige journalists chased all of these people out and many of the factors that appealed to them are still there (getting a platform to push your views) but it turns out those appeal much more to ideologues than those who want to write well in a paper with others who write well.

I think you have this backwards.

One of the big problems at the moment in news media is that a tiny number of papers have _so much more prestige_ than their competitors that its sucked the oxygen out of the industry: instead of (eg) Philadelphians reading the Inquirer, they read the Times, and so the Times can grow, and it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

This is pretty bad for local news, which is bad because there are a lot of local issues in the US! It's important to have good newspapers in (eg) North Dakota because the state has a lot of power.

It's also kinda ironic that you mentioned this on a thread about this article, because the author in question is the child of writers/academics/judges/lawyers, educated privately on the UWS, graduated summa cum laude from Yale where we wrote for "prestige" magazines, and then built his career through a bunch of lower prestige publications. He's an exact poster child for the NYTimes being near the top of the prestige chain!

When I say prestige, I mean among the population at large. The average person in America no longer looks at the Times as a prestigious organization. A few decades ago, they did.

I think much of the journalism of ideas is happening in podcasts now. Podcasts certainly more of a frontier right now, with lots of people (still!) trying out interesting things, compared to the shrinking world of print journalism.

'Rough Translation' with Gregory Warner is one of the best, imo. The idea of to take important stories in the US and find analogues in other countries, and look at how they've played out. Consistently fascinating.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510324/rough-translation

I don't think you're wrong (I don't know enough), but it's quite the caricature of entrepreneur culture to say that podcasts are doing journalism better than the journalists.

NYT is one paper, from one city. The scope of print journalism is vast and probably defeats podcasts 100 to 1.

Many of the people doing the best work in podcasting are journalists, make no mistake! Many who either are currently or formerly were at NPR, rotating long time contributors to This American Life, etc.

For the most part, podcast reporting is closer to magazine reporting than newspapers. ('Democracy Now' is maybe the exception that proves the rule?) But given the survival rate of magazines at this point in history, it's obvious that podcasts are where you're going to see more innovation.

This ignores the fact that journalism is a professional discipline with established ethical practices that is practiced by groups of journalists and editors together.

Now there's definitely an argument to be made that it routinely fails to live up to those standards and that it has certain structural weaknesses and biases that need to be addressed.

But it is, overall, a system of professionals who consider their work to be constrained in certain ways that are ethically important to them and the world. Individual podcasters might adhere to some of these standards but as a field it has no aspirations to that. Same with journalists leaving established papers to publish on substack with no editorial oversight. They are not practicing journalism as journalists see the field.

These things might replace journalism but they aren't it.

Text had no special claims in truth, I'm afraid. And many of the best podcasters are in fact journalists. Greg Warner, Sarah Koenig, even Alex Blumberg...

That's not what I'm claiming at all. It's not about the medium it's about the structures, constraints, and goals of the work.

I'm also not claiming that podcasting can't be journalism, just that the structures necessary for it to be aren't widespread or generally highly valued by podcasters as a group. Plenty of journalists do use it as their medium but that doesn't make podcasting and journalism the same thing.

And I never claimed that all podcasting is journalism...

Journalism is a subset of (text/audio), and some (writers/podcasters) care a lot more about journalistic standards than others.

I would argue that podcasting institutions - npr and affiliates, gimlet, radiotopia - actually do have a lot of understanding and respect for journalistic standards, and also represent a very large share of the most popular podcasts. I don't think the two media are as different in this regard as you seem to believe.

I worry that hardly anyone believes this anymore. Most of my acquaintance seem to think more highly of their favorite youtube "news" purveyor than any journalistic source. In their minds, journalism stopped being a practice some time ago, and now there are just media megacorps that produce check-the-box ideological hit pieces based on which billionaire owns the company at the moment.

I think that actual journalism is still alive in the hearts of many of the employees of those companies, but it's really hard to convince anyone else of that when there's no differentiation in placement or promotion between serious work and shoddy clickbait.

If that's true, then it's a real shame. I strongly prefer written text to podcasts.

Maybe that's just my own taste, but to be honest, I believe, that it's just a much, much better medium for conveying ideas. With text I can process the content non-linearly. I can skim to get an overview. I can go back to previous passages and find them again easily even days later. I can take more time to reflect on difficult parts and less time for stuff I know already. I can quote sentences easily to share insights with friends...

I've tried to get into podcasts more times than I can count. I just can't get there. Besides the advantages you describe, I can "consume" the content SO much more quickly on a page than a podcast, even if I speed it up, which seriously degrades the medium anyway.

I feel like many if not all podcasters are my “friends” who I chat with, only I don’t need to speak. I don’t see why they should convey their ideas any faster. I enjoy whatever time we spend together and it’s usually enough to fill the time on my commute or washing the dishes.

For me, the experience with friends is similar. If I want to mostly hear their voice and feel close to them, voice messages are great, but if I want or need some information then please, just send me a text.

I do listen to my podcasts at about 1.4x, with an additional feature to shorten silences (like pauses, and even between words and sentences) that bumps it up to about 1.5x-1.6x. To me, that makes them feel peppier without feeling rushed. (Compared to the standard pacing associated with radio broadcasts, which is what many podcasters aim for.)

As you note, this is used to provide distraction during time that my hands are busy but my ears aren't: commuting, running, etc. I suspect that at least some of the others in this thread are listening to music under similar circumstances. Or maybe they're just better than me about getting lost in their own thoughts.

> I can't name a single person that I'd consider the modern equivalent of Lapham, or even Christopher Hitchens.

If this person exists today, they are much more likely to be found on Substack than at The New York Times.

Right, but that's precisely the point: Lapham was the editor of Harper's, a top literary/news magazine, for almost 30 years. He was in an institutional position of power, not a random blogger on a new startup's site.

Aside: Oh Hitchens! There'l never be another like him. Every time I go back and read him, I get another take on the man and his messages; all not short enough, I'm afraid.

Each revision tends to oscillate wildly for me. I loathe him and I love him, rarely not at the same time.

Death, the artist, very slow; but you've heard that before.

His nom de guerre (l'auteur?) still rings true: A drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Rest well.

One issue is that most deep thinkers who challenge the neoliberal, corporate order have been ostracized to dissident status: Ralph Nader, Chomsky, and Chris Hedges come to mind.

There's no modern Lapham because we don't "need" (quotes because I actually think we have a big problem here) one anymore. Lapham's role was as a representative of the learned readership at the institution. These days, we're our own representatives. It is quite trivial for me to curate a list of extremely interesting individuals who publish writing or podcasts or lectures or whatever.

Now, the reason I quoted "need" above, what I think is a huge problem with the world today, is that by democratizing production we've done the opposite with consumption. It's super difficult to access high-quality information these days unless you're already fairly well educated and have the tools to filter the noise. I don't really know what to do about this.

For erudite articles on everything from Tang Dynasty poetry to the international ransom insurance market, I recommend the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Or, in general, any of the book reviews. They give assignments to gifted scholars and writers who take the books they "review" as starting points to go deep into all sorts of topics.

I personally think it's post-modernism and the adjacent ideologies are responsible for this. Since everything is subjective and there's no objective notion of truth and it's all moral relativism, one has the license to do anything they want. That's why activism and ideologies took over professional integrity.

Well, that's essentially what Allan Bloom argued what was happening in 1987. 33 years later, he certainly seems more right than wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mi...

I think pomo is responsible, along with a handful of other factors: clickbait journalism, dramatically increased echo chamber of journalists due to social media, and (perhaps most importantly), the changing values of Millenials.

Regarding the latter, it's only when Millenials started moving up the career ladder at these organizations in the early 2010s that we saw the publications really change. And the insider reports from the NYTimes indicate the change in reporting is basically an outcome of generational conflict.

Obviously, many on here are the exception, but in general, younger GenX, Millenials, and Zoomers were all financially screwed over, and they've (perhaps understandably) taken out their rage on society. Why so many have adopted a race-based identitarian outlook, instead of aiming for race-blind equality, I understand much less.

I'm not familiar with Lapham, but I'd consider many current New Yorker writers to be writing consistently interesting articles. Same with someone like Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books.

I used to be a big reader of The New Yorker. To me, they've slipped even more than the Times over the last decade, probably because they were on a higher perch.

I started reading about 10 years ago so don't have a great reference for earlier writing.

But just looking at some of ones from this year highlighted on longform, there was some great stuff here: https://longform.org/archive/publications/new-yorker

For instance "Trolling the Great Outdoors", "Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?", and "Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals?".

And its TV criticism under Emily Nussbaum (who hasn't written an article since 2019 for reasons I haven't been able to figure out) was consistently excellent.

It's not that they are universally terrible now, just that they've fallen into the same political-hype blackhole as everyone else.

I remember looking at their home page a few years ago and seeing the top 10 articles all being about Trump. That obsession with politics didn't really happen in previous eras and even when it did, it was counterbalanced by some legitimate literary criticism. Looking at their home page now, it's uh, not quite the same.

It's certainly true that it's gotten more topical and hence more overtly political. Part of this is surely a change to having more of an online readership (and online-only articles). When you're writing a magazine piece, it can be at best a week behind the news. This constraint doesn't exist for online pieces.

That being said, I think the New Yorker still offers some of the best and nuanced political analysis. I certainly prefer it to the New York Times.

I fault David Remnick, the editor, for this. He really became obsessed with Trump during his presidency.

The thing is, it seems like Mr. Remnick has been a very good administrator of the magazine, guiding it through a very rough time for print media, so the chances that he will be replaced or step down anytime soon are slim.

That said, I am looking forward to a fresh perspective for the magazine in the future even if I still mostly enjoy it now.

My approach is to take their weekly magazines (paper or digital) instead of browsing through the home page. Weekly editions still include an article or two on US politics, but in general are significantly more diverse.

WSJ, Economist, New Yorker have all been hollowed out.

NYT: the paper of "record." Regardless of past or modern quality, it seems kind of arrogant for a promulgater of copy to proclaim they have undisputed monopolies on truth and facts, doesn't it?

It's a term of art and doesn't have the meaning you attribute to it. Here's the definition from Wikipedia: "A newspaper of record is a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative."

When you consider NYC's other news dailies (the NY Post and the Daily News), it would be hard to disagree that the NYT is the most authoritative.

> It's a term of art [..] "A newspaper of record is a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative."

One definition of "authoritative" would be "able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable"

I'm not sure how anyone could seriously believe that to be an appropriate way to describe the NYT (or indeed any of their major competitors).

To be blunt: they're "accurate" and/or "true", except for the all the times when they aren't.

I’d love to see what the linked article’s writer thinks of Lewis Lapham’s prose. I suspect he’d be quite confused.

It is funny, because I read journalists complaining about exactly opposite. Journalism used to be a place where local non-elite people went. It did not required special education, but became more elite over time.

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