Suspects in 2 murder cases shared connection to 'Zizian' rationalist group | Hacker News Reader

Suspects in 2 murder cases shared connection to 'Zizian' rationalist group

openvallejo.org

45 pointsanigbrowl9 comments

I'm legitimately curious why this article was so hard to read. It had a rambling quality where I was never quite sure what the topic of a sentence or paragraph was.

The reporters appear to be young and inexperienced and the outlet looks understaffed.

I was mostly curious about it from the linguistic perspective, not the causal perspective. They're definitely doing some strange things with sentence structure.

No, you're right.

My guess is that: the writing is bad because the reporters never learned to write well. As if they never evolved past the "Campus news" style of writing that's taught in your first year of J-school. The inverted pyramid concept's been dinging around in their head for so long that I think they forgot which angle to craft a story from. And there's no one there to teach them how to break out of that and they haven't stayed in one spot long enough to build a relationship with an editor who could help them.

What is a inverted pyramid concept in terms of writing?

Is it the opposite of a topic sentence followed by supporting facts?

I'm sure I'm getting it wrong according to someone else, but I would say, yeah pretty much.

The "main ideas" in an inverted pyramid are pushed toward the bottom of the story. "Main ideas" and the topic sentence/argument and supporting detail-based format you may be expecting are interpreted different in general news writing, if they exist at all.

The general overview of the event—the lede—kicks the story off, the most sterile, but informative part:

> Two young people who applied in November for a marriage license in Washington have each been charged by authorities in separate January killings that claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo.

This format works better for mundane, routine, or sensational-but-disposal news stories. But a story has a narrative way too winding for this rudimentary of a template. I'm convinced that to actually apprehend the narrative the way we're able to (and I'm sure the writers would like to if they knew how or if they felt that they could) would compromise the notion of "objectivity" in basic news reporting. This is the "public safety" beat, not an editorial.

So from the first paragraph until the last:

> “There’s this whole literature and decision theory about this kind of thing. So there’s some amount of legitness behind this,” Taylor said of timeless decision theory. “But they take it in all these weird directions where they’re talking about, like, ‘Oh, maybe if I make this decision, I will, like, burn the entire timeline.’ And so it gets really weird.”

Is constipation, no coherence, no cohesiveness. The writing isn't supposed to prove a point or make a statement, it's just...information. And due to the scale of the subject matter, it should attempt the former, but fails at the latter. The caveat is, if they had shaved the story down to just enough information to make a readable, coherent piece, then they'd be accused of leaving out critical information.

This other site is cancer on mobile but more straightforward regurgitation of the prosecution's initial statements on connection between three or more different murder cases.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-z...

Sad state of affairs when SFgate is the more literate source. That said, I have to say its writing is getting better than this article was much more clearly structured.

The layout of the other was cancer even on desktop.

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