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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Major newspapers and even local ones (if they still exist) have been so dumbed down in the past few decades. I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. Worse, news often seems to be written to elicit outrage or fear (probably because "engagement").

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I can't access the article, so I don't know which newspaper they were subscribed to. But, given the wording of "the leading national newspaper", I can assume it would be "Le Monde".

The audience for the written paper is not less-than-high-school educated. Do you think the wording is at this level ?

Eg: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/09/08/pisa-202...

In terms of the actual ideas being promulgated, Le Monde is approximately CP-level.

CP stands for child porn?

hopefully 'college prep' or the like. so highschool-level (low bar)

Cours préparatoire

Classe Préparatoire. When you quit kindergarden and enter ‘real school’. Age 6

I guess it is meant as hyperbole, though I read NRC, Le Monde and NYT and can confirm that le Monde is the leading newspaper of France but it is not the newspaper it was. Mostly opinion and lifestyle, not a lot of investigative or even just in-depth journalism. Mostly preaching (some of it for causes I happen to agree with, but still)

Yes, I suppose it's expected to accuse a newspaper of being not high minded enough, and use a childish level of tease. Anyway....

The investigative journalism is still there - they're usually on the same big international stories as the guardian or NYT (which, okay, I get it are not enough to the left to be considered serious in this thread, we get it. Meanwhile the vast majority of people think they're red bastion and watch hard right "news" tv channels and tiktok reals, but let's all pretend it's the same thing to continue feeling smug about ourselves.)

However, they're VERY bad at putting those "deep" article in the front page of the website. The "paper" paper does a better job - when a 10 lines articles sits next to a full pager, you get a sense of hierarchy.

When there is only the title on the front page, you don't get this.

Also, they have "live threads" for everything , and "alerts" for anything.

No, French equivalent of US 1st grade

Le Monde is mainly entertainment/preachy articles nowadays. Content and writing is usually better in the "Le Monde Diplomatique", although it's more politically biased.

English version: https://mondediplo.com/

To be politically "neutral" is to be biased.

The front page of Le Monde tonight is about the PISA ranking, a profile of the Putin presidency, an interview about constitutional rights, and an article about Chinese red guards under communist china.

Seriously, you call that "entertainment" ?

As for calling them to be "preachy", that's another thing; but then presenting the Diplo as a counterpoint is weird, right ? ;) (there is hardly any major newspaper more preachy and self-righteous than them. But, I mean, I'm very glad they _exist_ as long as you don't require me to read it, that's fine.)

From today's front page, this kind of article: https://archive.md/Dr1fm

Selection at university, which happens everywhere else in the world, is "controversial". When you read the article, you realize that the main opponents are communists (well, the Stalinist branch, since France has 3 or 4 communist parties), who do around 2-3% in elections. So it's not very controversial, actually.

The Diplo is biased but doesn't try to hide their bias with this kind of tedious astroturfing, which I believe is quite toxic for teenagers reading a newspaper. It's a different format, I agree with that, though.

> I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level.

I would have imagined they would have been targeting less than high school literacy since their inception. At least the ones intended to be read by the masses. I'd actually expect that they target somewhere in the 4th-6th grade literacy range.

It used to be a pretty well-known guideline that any writing for general consumption should be at no higher than an 8th grade level.

Well then I think 8th grade level must have been higher in the past than it is today.

My local paper (basically a reprint of Gannett stories with a few local ones, mostly sports) tends to use a very basic vocabulary, often organizes stories as a set of questions/answers, or bullet point lists under a "What you need to know about..." headline.

When I think back to newspapers I read in high school (1980s) or even in the 1990s they weren't written at that low a level.

Your first point is true, unequivocally so. I watched it happen ... from inside the newsroom for almost two decades.

We were actually taught in journalism school to write straight-up news for a Grade 5 level audience. You could get fancy if you chose in opinion pieces.

To your second point, if it bleeds it leads. That's always been the case. Journalism is, and always has been, a business. A sensational news story of yesteryear is today's viral content. It's the same thing — both are desirable because they sell.

Back in the mid-1990's, I took training as a literacy tutor. Our instructor noted that region's major newspapers (Detroit, USA) were written to a 6th-grade reading level. Except for the sports section, which was more like 3rd grade level.

I will agree that the Attention Economy has replaced most of the traditional "news" with angry click-bait.

In Germany, there was a survey around 2009/2010, depicting that more than 60% of the audience of the major national daily newsshow do not understand the words used by the moderators

(it was about "Tagesschau", a major news outlet by the public broadcasting system)

> more than 60% of the audience of the major national daily newsshow do not understand the words used by the moderators

I don't want to deny a modern problem may exist based on additional signals, but this statistic isn't necessarily bad: News ought to be consistently exposing viewers to vocabulary they don't know.

Not just as a way to help people naturally grow their vocabulary by seeing it used in context, but also because the news should cover topics and specialties that are outside any individual's usual work and leisure.

Maybe they should have used Arabic words.

Yeah, it's really sad, but it's a nail in the coffin of democracy. And prosperity. The news papers here seem to be written for 30/40 yr old, middle class women with just enough spare time to feel guilty about other people's behavior.

I’m not sure the misogyny is warranted.

It's not misogyny. They seem to be the target audience. It's also surprising you only comment on the gender.

I’m commenting on this, which is clearly misogynistic dreck.

> 30/40 yr old, middle class women with just enough spare time to feel guilty about other people's behavior

fair. plausibly tested what's easy enough to do and still seems like a win. we need a separate treatment for increasing informativeness of news.

They've been dumbed down for a reason...

It’s admittedly been a long time since I looked at a local newspaper, but I do seem them occasionally. Kinda seems like the local ones are just the local news segment in text format. Fine, but I can read that on my phone or watch it on the TV with much more convenience. Maybe there’s some interesting stuff left in classified ads or whatnot, but a lot of that shit so on marketplace now.

Local is where getting the news is the hardest. My local school board meets at the same time as the local zoning board...

My town publishes city meeting minutes - "debated to change zoning regulations in [development], it passed 2-3". What changes were made? What were the debate points? Once I get that information who do I vote for/against in the next election if I care about the change.

I really want a local news paper that covers the above types of things. I can't find it and in turn I have no idea who to vote for. Town positions are partizan so I at least I know democrat/republican (for whatever that means...). I also know all candidates are married and have kids - and the family picture was taken by someone who knows how to make them look good. They all will "fight for me" as well, but never do they promise anything that might be controversial (unlike their opponent - they are obviously biased against their opponent and yet they are my best source of information about their opponent)

National news I will hear about and I can form opinions. However local it is much harder. The newspapers I have access to are not helping.

The unfortunate part is that while a lot of people might want that information, few will pay for it. I ran a small company's paywall, like this was a small chain of local papers. We could barely give the subscriptions away.

If you're lucky, you'll have a motivated local blogger who attends the meetings and posts reports. If you do, throw them a few bucks in whatever way they accept payments. The local paper used to send a reporter to do that but they only have a couple of actual reporters working now.

I used to feel that way, but I've come back around to finding it easier to read the news in the actual paper. For once, I'm not going to get distracted by a text or email notification. But more importantly, there's no cookie notification to dismiss, there's no autoplay video ad that somehow got around my pihole and ublock origin, there's no subscription nag flyout, and I don't have to log in every time despite clicking on "Remember me."

Plus, there's the visual cue to those around me that I'm not just idly scrolling, I'm actually looking at something.

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