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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's a viable start up news idea to have deep investigative journalism like articles that all have a sister article written in an Axios style that boil everything down to the major points.

The article was well written but I just am not interested that much in hockey to read the entire long form without any idea of the general points.

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The death of writing is a bullet-list of major points, put some effort in, maybe you'll become more interested in hockey after reading the article.

I enjoy reading well researched articles, just not all the time. The ideal would be this article with an alternate version, not the reduction of the article to the bullet points only. Books aren't dead just because wikipedia has a plot summary on every important one.

What I do in these cases is bookmark the article / save it elsewhere, and read it when I'm in a mood to digest a longer article. For what it's worth, I enjoyed the prose of this article and I would rather see more articles like it, than condensing everything to bullet points.

But the pinnacle of journalism, the gold standard, the One True Way that's taught to every journalist - and then promptly forgotten when they go to work - is the Inverted Pyramid. The LOD/mipmapping equivalent for words: start with a very short summary of most important things. Then expand the details. Then expand them more. Repeat recursively.

The inverted pyramid is used for news stories. That is what you would expect from the NYTimes, CNN, or your local newspaper.

But The Atlantic isn't news stories. They are general interest essays. They are all long form stories that tell a narrative and dive deep into topics.

I loved the article and read it entirely, but I'm definitely even less interested in hockey now.

I totally get you, but maybe the better conclusion is just that the article isn't for you? I mean that in the opposite of a judgy way; think for a second about just how much knowledge there is out there. Even if you leave out stuff that goes infinitely deep like the sciences, there's way more details to all the topics you might come across in life than anyone can learn in a lifetime.

For example, sometimes I'll watch videos of snooker games on YouTube. Chances are you know absolutely nothing about snooker, but the thing is, I don't really either. I can't keep the rules straight because I so rarely pay attention to it. I can't name more than one professional snooker player. It's fun to watch and can relieve a few minutes of boredom, but that's about it for me. And ... I think that's okay? Some sports, like lacrosse, I know absolutely nothing about, and that seems okay too!

I guess what this comment boils down to is that I don't think I understand what you would get out of a "bullet points" version of an article like this. Do you need to know anything about hockey? Preparing for a Jeopardy tournament or something? Despite not really enjoying hockey myself, what I got out of this article was some pleasure inherent to reading the thoughts of someone who has obviously thought very hard about a specific subject, and writes about those thoughts in a clear way.

> the better conclusion is just that the article isn't for you

Yes. I love The Atlantic. They are long-from general interest stories and usually written exceptionally well. But they post a lot of essays every day in a wide range of topics. Not all of them are for everyone. You got to pick what you want to read. There are plenty of essays that they publish that I have no interest in. But that's ok. They are interesting to someone. And isn't that what makes life so interesting? That everyone is so different?

I think we forget that now. Every story must be written for everyone collectively. It leads to less interesting stories.

To be honest, this story wouldn't benefit from bullet points. Not everything can be summarized. Imagine a campfire story and you say, "i don't want to wait until dark and make a fire and hike into the woods to hear the story, just give me the bullet points". It would be pointless. Life is about the nuances.

Some sites (CNBC comes to mind) put summaries in the form of a bullet list at the top of most of their articles which I think is pretty cool.

I know nothing about hockey, will certainly never play and probably never watch a game. The article was well written and interesting even from my distant perspective. I learnt a couple of things, which, admittedly, will never have any use to me. Still an interesting read.

I think a kind of executive summary would make this drier and less engaging, with less flavour and context. So a worse article overall. In any case, the TL;DR is already in the title.

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