Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnmullany | Hacker News Reader

The reason why the Economist articles all read the same is that they go through a process called "subbing" or sub-editing by the same small group of editors who own the Economist's "voice".

I interned at the Economist one summer in college and wrote two articles for it - the published articles bore a small relationship to what I had submitted. The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's of a certain age with an eclectic range of expertises, as far as I recall.

View on HN

Letters to the editor probably go through the same meat grinder.

I sent a comment once, that was published. It had been entirely rewritten, with almost no loss of meaning but complete overhaul of style, and no indication that it had been the case.

I didn't mind that it was rewritten, but thought they should disclose that fact.

Edit: I mean I think they should make it clearer to readers that published letters have been rewritten, and in some cases, heavily.

we do. all letters sent in by emailed in get the following autoreply:

"The Economist thanks you for your letter, which has been passed to the author of the article. All letters are edited if selected for publication either in print or online.

We will need to know where you are writing from, so please ensure you have supplied the name of the city, town or village and the country if that is not obvious.

If you do not wish your letter to be published send an e-mail promptly to letters@economist.com."

I'm surprised GP didn't expect that the letter would be edited.

One of my letters was published. I fully expected that it would be edited and was pleased with the result. You can see both versions here - https://gist.github.com/nindalf/12a533f6ff64d7f146845f289acd.... I thought the edited version conveys the intent well.

That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Seconded!

I agree that this is smart editing that preserves the original meaning well. The one decision I question is simplifying your nicely-phrased “Most programmers spend most of their time attaching these disparate blocks together” to just “most programmers spend their time [...]”

If I was King: Default assumption that statements are generalizations, unless explicitly stated otherwise. To preempt pedantry.

Programmers => Programmers in general, with many obvious exceptions, too numerous to list in a brief reply.

All Programmers => All Programmers

PS- Hmmm. Now I wonder if any style guides cover this? Surely some do.

Thanks for sharing the comparison!

I think I agree, the edited version conveys the meaning and intent well. I assume the links were removed as a matter of form factor/medium.

Disclosed to the reader, not to the letter writer.

Yes, that was my point and I should have made it better.

(Also, there's a difference between editing and rewriting.)

Before my internet addiction distracted me from it, I made a sport of writing letters to newspapers, and my success rate for over a decade was about 8/10 published to submitted. I had one or two in the Economist, with many more in the Financial Times, and others in lesser known papers. They're all in a drawer somewhere now as some very humble personal trophies.

However, my final one was edited so horrendously and offensively in print that the only charitable interpretation was that English was not the letters editor's first language. After a few emails back and forth, and the terse revelation from a very piqued editor that English was in fact her first language, she graciously corrected the online version. My advice to anyone who wants emulate the house style of The Economist is that they should read P.G. Wodehouse first.

I stopped writing letters after that because it signalled a shift in culture at the papers, where the people working for them didn't seem to have the same relationship to truth they once appeared to. The feeling of opening that salmon coloured paper to find your letter in it (with only modest surprise) and giving your morning coffee a smug celebratory sip is one of the things upvotes on the internet have not yet been able to replace.

Heh, heh. As a physicist, I wrote the entire technical section on polarization for my small company’s optics catalog. It got “edited” by the personnel manager, a UT Austin English major who was not dumb. Almost had a coronary at age 36.

I had to run a job ad for a programmer so I took the template provided by HR, added my list of buzzwords and acronyms, and corrected the many factual, grammatical, and spelling errors in the original document.

They ran my ad but the only part that varied from the template was my list if "tech skills". Unfortunately, this meant the job ad was "pre-covid" so it stated we do not work remotely, you must be local, etc. Sigh.

I wonder how many companies have optics catalogs. I needed a mirror with a reflective front surface (instead of inside or on the back where the light has to go through the glass on a normal mirror) to do what they did in Tim’s Vermeer (the simple mirror version, not the full lens version, although that would be cool if I can figure out the parts I need). Anyway, they (Edmunds) later sent me a full catalog with all kinds of laser stuff I don’t understand with detailed educational information about them and how to set up proper measurement systems and so on.

Even in this short sample comment I enjoyed your writing. And I agree, that sounds much more satisfying than updoots

I'm mightily confused by the downvotes for the compliment i wrote

My guess: it's the word "updoot" that people are downvoting.

Discussion about the voting on comments is generally discouraged[0]:

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Now THIS person writes.

Sir, I'm dismayed to learn that you have developed an addiction to the InterWebs. I would have expected the business model of said Webs (arrant nonsense + commcercial surveillance) to repel you as it repels any civilised mind.

That said, I personally have learned nothing from the Economist either. Wodehousian style or not.

I recommend Stephen Leacock. Yours etc...

This is common. Most publication houses, including magazines and newspapers, have a 'house style' that is enforced by an editorial staff.

They can probably be replaced by a neural network in time, leaving humans to just doing content reviews.

Doesn't 'the voice' evolve overtime though? How can a neural network evolve on its own.

Train it every year on the senior editors' publication.

So we can't get rid of the senior editors after all?

Why get rid of them? Automatisation should not mean getting rid of people, it should mean letting them do other things. In this scenario the editors could spend more time on their own writing instead of having to look at junior writer's texts

Editors are not necessarily investigators.

(metaphor/similar example follows)

In the same sense that someone who reviews a (IT) technical procedure is not necessarily a systems administrator, but someone who sees things from an angle to ensure RACI model is followed throughout without any generalizations such as "backup is taken" (by who? using which tools? which systems/data are backed up? how often? how long do we keep the tapes? how often do we trash the tapes? where do we store the tapes?). I haven't taken a backup for more than a decade, but I would shred a backup procedure to pieces. If you remove me from the review cycle, I won't go back to writing procedures.

The publications that were replaced by a neural network?

You could do small random variations (evolving the network) and assign some score to them (either number of sales, or scores by the staff)

Hopefully their editors are operating on principles other than increasing sales.

>How can a neural network evolve on its own.

Same way as humans? Via training on new inputs?

> Via training on new inputs?

There are no new inputs in this case because we got replaced editors with NN.

Nothing stops us from feeding them the work of human editors in 2000000 other publications...

Or their own work, as ranked by readers (e.g. their past posts that had the more views and better engagement).

No. This is drastically missing the point of what The Economist (or almost any media org) is. It isn't trying to be an average from 20000000 other publications, or what an average of readers think, or what had good engagement stats (though obviously the latter is a good target for the application of analytical software). It's not a neutral voice, or some down-the-middle average of what readers liked. It's an entity with its own political goals.

It's not even vaguely similar to a person, so how would that work? ln this example, if you had a hypothetical AI that understood the UK class system + the political system + the press system + the way these interlocking relationships work from a particular elite PoV then sure, but that's magical thinking. The actual written style is a small part of that; the other things are the inputs.

>ln this example, if you had a hypothetical AI that understood the UK class system + the political system + the press system + the way these interlocking relationships work from a particular elite PoV then sure, but that's magical thinking.

It doesn't have to understand any of those in any "human" sense, where it would be able to articulate what it understood on a meta level, etc.

It would just have to reinforce the right patterns and fuzzy connections that lead to success in writing credible looking articles....

> It would just have to reinforce the right patterns and fuzzy connections that lead to success in writing _credible looking articles_

We're probably at a point where we can manufacture shallow fakes of the current writing style, and I'm sure techniques like this will become prevalent (because convenience), but I feel you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It does need to understand these things. If it doesn't, then what it is is a mechanical reproduction of a current style of writing: that's a completely different category of thing, it's not even close to similar.

Reinforcement learning.

Isn't that more or less what Grammarly Premium can do? I'm not a subscriber, but their site says it offers suggestions on tone and clarity.

I’d bet against this. Neural networks still don’t actually understand the text at all. I would imagine true understanding is required for this task. You can’t get to the moon climbing progressively higher trees.

This is very similar to how code bases are 'edited' to fit the coding style of the team/project/company.

I guess the main difference is that code editing is done in collaboration with the author (code review) as opposed to an editor.

If refactoring code did not have the potential side-effect of changing its run-time behaviour (or performance) I'd argue that software engineering would also benefit from a 'code editor' role :)

Most companies institute code reviews and invest in tooling that stops nonstandard code (formatting and convention-wise) getting into the codebase, once they grow large enough. I think these two processes serve the same purpose, albeit with numerous exceptions depending on the seniority of the committer and reviewer(s) :)

> The sub-editors seemed to be mostly George Smiley-type Oxford and Cambridge PhD's

As an Economist reader for 15 years now and as a big Le Carre fan that’s exactly how I imagined them to be. Even though after the latest editor change there seems to have been a notable change in tone/style, most visible (for me) in the US-related section (calling a sitting US president names isn’t what I expected from The Economist).

It's probably also why their articles never seem to start with On a gloomy morning of June 22, 2015... - the much hated opening of so many other magazines who probably think it's a good way of engaging the reader. I hate this style so much. The editors who encourage it have no idea how disengaging their style is. Kudos to the Economist for not doing this.

Seriously. When I see that, I do a mini-eyeroll and scroll to find the point of the article. The Economist does a good job of putting content first.

True. But given the examples in the article this is done in a masterful way.

One place that does this, it's obvious and uncreatively done: Deutsche Welle for their English articles.

I am guessing this could come as a side effect of proof-reading articles written by authors who don't write in English with a native fluency?

Could be (though they have the capability to hire native speakers), or maybe they have a very cookie-cutter manual. (Not sure their German headlines have the same patterns but I think not, or at least it doesn't sound so unnatural)

Can’t stand the final sentence witticisms. Reduces the credibility of the entire article. You can almost hear those Oxford and Cambridge PhD’s chortling about their own cleverness. And no byline is a form of slavery.

> No byline is a form of slavery

Don’t be ridiculous. This is a feature not a bug. It helps discourage sensationalism and encourage a sober viewpoint that’s not designed to generate Twitter or Instagram followers. I wish more news sources would do this.

With you on the witticisms though

If Wikipedia is right

> Smiley was born to middle-class parents

Doesn't sound like the Economist

In the UK, "Middle Class" is more of a mindset than an economic class (although economic class is definitely a part of it).

You can think of it more as the US middle-upper-class.

This musical number from the UK comedy "Mongrels" more-or-less nails the mindset:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yr4yEguWrw

Yeah I know the difference between economic and social class. I'm saying that's the wrong social class for the Economist.

I'm British, have read the Economist in the past and a friend of mine interned there. I think "middle class" is bang on to describe their audience, which ranges from aspirational students to working professionals who want a quick news summary with some wit. Not many builders (working), dukes (upper) or Oxford faculty (upper middle) would be caught reading it. It's definitely seen as middlebrow fodder for undergraduates.

What is the more high brow alternative?

Depends what topic you're going for but the guardian or ft, tatler, London or new York review of books, times literary supplement etc would be found in eg a London club library. Economist too, it's a light but fun read.

Are you really saying The Guardian is higher-brow than The Economist? As a regular reader of both I would never have guessed it. (I'm not British, if it matters.)

It's probably the highest brow of the mainstream (ie, non FT) newspapers. It's seen as less try hard and pseudointellectual than the Economist i think.

The Guardian is probably the most often quoted publication in Private Eye's "Pseuds Corner", a regular selection of unintentionally amusing psuedo-intellectual writing.

Oh no doubt, I'm just talking about general perception. The Economist hides its pseudiness better, behind the simple writing style (which I enjoy).

One of the catchy Economist adverts claims "99% of the 1% are subscribers". I get to interact now and then with this demographic and conversations often use a recent article in The Economist as a starting point. It may be middle class in the country it is published, but it has found elite clientele around the world.

My perhaps incorrect impression has been that middle class means something a bit different in a country with royalty.

Back when they were still moderately important publications, Time and Newsweek were probably similar although more US-centric and mainstream. But similar in that they tended to draw from the Ivies and other establishment schools. Likely significant overlap with the Times and the Post.

Ah, so all the crazy stuff Ive seen from them I should blame on the editors and not the individual writers? Good to know, of course just by reading it you know its the Oxbridge types in charge, and I dont consider that a good thing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com