Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The home page of the New York Times now looks like a Twitter feed. Very little copy per story. There's an important story right now - Israel vs. Gaza may be headed for a cease-fire deal. Home page info, useless. Linked content, useful, but too much blithering before they get to the actual terms. The important content: "In the first phase, fighting would stop for about 30 days while women, elderly and wounded hostages were released by Hamas. During that period, the two sides would work out details of a second phase that would suspend military operations for roughly another 30 days in exchange for Israeli soldiers and male civilians being held. The ratio of Palestinians to be released from Israeli prisons is still to be negotiated but that is viewed as a solvable issue. The deal would also allow for more humanitarian aid into Gaza." But is that up front? No.[1] That's the high end of mainstream media. The low end usually begins "10 ways to ..." I want a filter for those.

People posting videos is fine. People posting unedited videos is not fine. Talking heads wearing headphones in love with the sound of their own voice - no. Run those guys through speech to text conversion and have ChatGPT summarize.

"And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." - Tom Lehrer

[1] https://archive.is/pkoy8#selection-7311.100-7311.620

There used to be a style for journalism called reverse pyramid. The most important part is at the start and then details get filled in. Online video has turned this on its head.

Say thank you to the advertising industry ("is this video long enough so we can slap a midroll ad in it?")

Burying the lede? Interestingly I searched for the phrase and the second hit was someone describing why they were leaving NYT.

Long-form journalism did too, where I have to wade through long physical descriptions of all the relevant parties before I begin to get inklings of what actually happened that's supposed to be so interesting.

Long-form journalism is for those who want to read, not who want to get information. And that's fine. "For those who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like." The problem comes when long-form journalism and "news" are put in the same "list of things you might be interested in reading".

I sorely miss that kind of quality journalism. The Wall Street Journal still practices it (mostly). Everywhere else is, as you say, turned on its head by starting with click bait questions that only get answered at the end of the article, if at all.

Obligatory get off my lawn and shakes fist at cloud.

Sadly, due to being on the first floor* I don't have a lawn.

I do keep considering balcony mounts for what would've been the lawn defence cannon though.

* en_UK first floor, mind, I know en_US insists on 1-based indexing rather than 0-based for floors but I don't particularly like writing FORTRAN either.

In the US floor numbering is ordinal, 1st, 2nd, etc. In the UK it seems like they are cardinal or nominal.

Do you have a zeroth floor?

I believe they call the zeroth floor the "ground floor".

Yep, Ground, 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.

Which I would argue is close enough for me to consider it zero-based.

Elevators in the UK mostly have G rather than 0 on the buttons so far as I can remember though; I've completely forgotten what mainland Europe does.

Yes, and negative numbers as well.

https://i.redd.it/8vuvnovra9b31.jpg

That was as much a product of market circumstance as the current click-bait: Due to space constraints and the possibility of breaking news, editors would regularly cut articles from the bottom up to save space. Reporters could not know whether their story would be cut or by how much. So as a practical matter they had to front-load the most important parts.

So it isn't today, plenty of space, but space alone doesn't scale cash.

Especially wire service copy. It let editors cut articles at a more or less arbitrary point to fill the available space. Magazine articles by contrast weren't necessarily structured the same way.

A lot of people like to worship inverted pyramid as some Platonic ideal, but it was certainly not universally used outside of situations where there were some specific constraints.

I’m sure that was part of the motivation, but it was taught to me as “readers often stop reading after one or two grafs, so put the most important information up front.”

It ends up working so that both pressures apply the same way: reverse pyramid organizes information so busy/distracted readers should get the most salient bits, and also lets editors cut the less important details for space. Whether this worked out, I think, was pretty dependent on the journalist and publication, but “most important” is usually a bit subjective so that’s to be expected.

Almost everyone who reads your stuff online is busy/distracted, because they're online. They may have 40 tabs open. You have to give them a reason to be interested in your tab, fast. If you don't give it to them in... 7 seconds? 5? 3? Then they're gone. They close your tab and move on to the next one.

They're probably not even reading your first paragraph. They're skimming it. They might skim the second. You want them to actually read your article? Give them a reason in that first paragraph. Give them more reason in the second. Keep giving it to them, paragraph by paragraph. If you don't, they're gone.

This style of journalism predated “online” by decades or longer.

Even then people skimmed print newspapers. It’s why they were in columns and grafs were short (often one sentence). All of that was designed to make articles easy to skim.

And yes, distraction/boredom was part of it but so was a lack of time for most readers. A lot of news was read over a short breakfast before going to work. A lot of conventions were designed to make it easy to get a quick and broad overview of what the editor thought was important: pyramid style, short blips before “continued on page 11”, putting important things above the fold, etc.

It’s interesting which of those aspects translate well to online journalism and which don’t.

This is called the inverted pyramid and should be referred to in the present tense. It is still taught and it is still used.

https://journalism.uoregon.edu/tough-decisions-inverted-pyra...

Much of what is on the web posing as "news" is not journalism, IMO. It's garbage.

I hate it when news sites post videos, it just doesn’t work if you’re in a room with multiple people and everyone is looking at a different video with audio.

Embedded tweets are on the same level of annoyance. The introduction blurb and connecting sentences could be reduced to an <hr> tag so entire articles become a series of tweets and videos back-to-back.

> too much blithering before they get to the actual terms

Thank you!

That's my biggest gripe with news today, broadly speaking.

People keep telling me they prefer reading a "story", but I just want the news, not the first chapter of a mediocre novel.

I've taken Feynman's rule as the guiding star of all communication: if you can not explain your point of view understandably, you do not understand it well enough yourself. (Implication: shut the f##k up until you do, and can.) I've added the requirement from Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away." Then I've taken that to combination to its logical extreme:

Make your point in seven words.

More recently I have learned that Cicero had the same rule for his effective communication. Although he had the upper limit at ten words.

The Finnish language has a wonderful capability to express all of that in a single word: "Asiaan!" -- to convey the same message in English you need to waste five words in total, "get to the point already".

You are making the classic mistake of taking some good generic pieces of advice and forming them into a non-sensical and limiting rule. Do yourself a favor and let things be judged by their effect and not their limitations.

You're going too far.

De Saint-Exupéry had a reasonable idea.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be exactly as complex as they are.

If you pick an arbitrary number, you are limiting yourself only to simpler ideas.

Keep it suitably simple.

I don't try to claim it's easy in any way, but for me it is a thing to aspire for.

Nuance takes time and space. So does conveying context. Nonetheless, if there is a way to compress the core of the message into just seven words, I will try to do so. When it succeeds, it helps to hold attention long enough to actually deliver the more nuanced details.

Another commenter brought up the old-school journalists' pyramid rule. I'm very much aware that what I aim for is an extreme form of focusing on the sharp pointy end.

It's very funny that it took you 140 words to say "cut until you have 7 words".

I'd be careful about modelling my communication style after Cicero. He ended up decapitated and his head put on the Senate rostrum. Seems like a pretty clear message about what people thought of his communication style, in my view.

The proposed deal seems to be the same as that suggested by numerous parties already, and where it approaches points of contention (how much aid, how many prisoners) it's not yet determined. If you had asked me to guess the structure of any deal I would guess something very close to that.

The reason the details are not highlighted is the new information is about the political process of the deal, not what its terms are.

How to read the NYT on the web using early 90s-style web clients.

usage: 1.sh [section]

    #!/bin/sh
    test $1||exec sed -n '/[^/];;.*)/p' $0
    case $1 in :)    
    ;;fashion ) 
    break
    ;;crosswords ) 
    break
    ;;us )
    break
    ;;briefing )
    break
    ;;sports )
    break
    ;;opinion )
    break
    ;;magazine )
    break
    ;;theater )
    break
    ;;style )
    break
    ;;business )
    break
    ;;technology )
    break
    ;;realestate )
    break
    ;;t-magazine )
    break
    ;;climate )
    break
    ;;nyregion )
    break
    ;;arts )
    break
    ;;obituaries )
    break
    ;;dining )
    break
    ;;health )
    break
    ;;briefing )
    break
    ;;well )
    break
    ;;learning )
    break
    ;;science )
    esac
    exec ftp -4o'|sed -n "/\"guid\":/{s/.* \"//;s/\",//p;}"' https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$1/index.jsonp

For example, in the "World" section there are 20 URLs in the JSON.

All of these articles are available in the Internet Archive, only one is truncated by a "paywall".

Javascript is not required to read these at IA using a text-only browser.

For example, here are the first 5 as they appear in the JSON

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128080606if_/https://www.ny...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128050905if_/https://www.ny...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128101334if_/https://www.ny...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128102228if_/https://www.ny...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128132850if_/https://www.ny...

URL #20 is a page containing URLs for 82 videos. All of them appear to be available in the Internet Archive. (Note I did not test all 82.)

For example, here are the first 5 1080p videos as they appear in the HTML. There appears to be no advertising. (Note I did not watch all the videos.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128012239/https://vp.nyt.co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128012239/https://vp.nyt.co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128012239/https://vp.nyt.co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128012239/https://vp.nyt.co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240128012239/https://vp.nyt.co...

A "modern" web browser, Javascript and so on was not required.

It's still possible to access the web from the command line as people did in the early 90s when using the original "line mode browser".

https://www.w3.org/Clients.html

https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/LineMode/Browser.html

https://www.w3.org/LineMode/

Cannot speak for anyone else, but I prefer the non-commercial clients of the early web to the ones today controlled by so-called "tech" companies.

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