Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwerbret | Hacker News Reader

> What I hate when I'm reading these things is the colorful, biography-like nonsense that major publications (and self-important "journalists") like to toss into stories

I've noticed that many supposedly serious, non-fiction books written in the past two decades begin (and are liberally interspersed) with such "prose"; I personally find it so irritating that I invariably drop the book immediately and read no further. As such writing doesn't seem to be associated with any particular author, publisher or theme, I imagine it represents an effort, across the publishing industry, to make non-fiction books more appealing to the general public.

View on HN

Good story sells and can help reach a wider audience. Wouldn't that be valuable if you want people to learn from these failures?

As an example, the wiki page for Falcon 1 rocket is jam packed with information [0] There is a recent book pretty much depicting the same period [1]. I already knew the details thanks to the wiki page. That doesn't mean I'd want to skip the book.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1

[1] - https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?v...

  > I imagine it represents an effort, across the publishing industry, to make non-fiction books more appealing to the general public.

I'd never thought about that, but I think you're right. And it really comes off distastefully -- like the writer feels they're so important that we must care about his job rather than the product. It's a sort of "code smell" for journalism for me, like the journalist is trying to personalize the story so that I feel a connection with them and accept whatever narrative they're trying to create.

It's the "long form journalism" style; try to make journalism into "art", stretch the length of the content, and slap a minimalistic design with a fresh logo on the website in an effort to get a certain kind of audience.

Or a bit of the ego of the writer is getting in and becoming the story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com