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Comment by ryao | Hacker News Reader

The article is drama piece that makes you go on a scavenger hunt for the Five Ws. I stopped reading as soon as I noticed the pattern. I would ask AI to summarize, but my enthusiasm for learning anything from this kind of article has waned dramatically over the years.

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Here's some shorter reporting for you if that's what you want:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-z...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/15/northern-california-z...

It's a stylistic choice, many people like reading this kind of piece. You don't have to read it. There's room on the web for different kinds of writing styles.

If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel. I actually read foreign novels for fun, so that is not hyperbole.

That said, this stylistic choice works for computer security related things (e.g. the spy genre of news). It feels like a waste of time everywhere else.

It was more about the, ya know, murder cult thing, than technology. It's an artifact of telling a story - which is different than relaying a 'classic' journalism piece where the 5W's are most important.

"Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat."

I wanted to keep reading, so I guess I was their audience - not everything has to be up to your personal standards to be worth while.

"If I wanted to read a novel, I would read an actual novel."

As parent mentioned. You do have a choice not to read novels, or to read novels. That doesn't make a novel bad because it is a novel.

I don’t have a choice if I want to know the 5 W’s here. If every news article was like this, nobody could know the news because they would still be reading yesterday’s news when today’s news is published.

Perhaps AI could help here by rewriting the article into the format it should have used, but then you risk hallucinations.

There are various kinds of news articles. This is what’s known as a feature article: in depth coverage of a particular topic. Those topics are not usually the daily headline stories and are not read-it-today urgent. If you don’t want to read features, don’t. There have been other articles on the topic.

If every article was in your preferred format, I would probably enjoy reading less.

Thankfully, there's a variety of writing styles, so that every one of us can find something we enjoy reading and skip the stuff we don't enjoy.

I don't see why you should be the sole arbiter of what writing style is allowed.

Who are you to say what format a piece of journalism 'should have used'? You could apply your misplaced outrage about the 'Five W's' to any number of Pulitzer Prize winning long-form pieces from the last century.

In short, you appear to only be familiar with the mandated style for factual news-reporting - not for other journalistic output - and seem to think all deviation is in error.

Here's an example from one of the kings of the form - Michael Lewis - and his award-winning piece of financial journalism regarding the Greek bond crisis that nearly brought down the Euro:

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2010/10/beware-of-gre...

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