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Comment by schnevets | Hacker News Reader

  <priority value="1">This amounts to de facto resegregation. <priority="4">(And we all know how we segregation worked out the first time.)</priority> If the school district still values integrated schools, it must act swiftly to correct this effect.</priority>

Forget about editors, use this kind of mark-up for your readers. Imagine changing an in-depth article into a truncated, 200-word summary with the click of a button. Activating a different tag would include the reporter's subjective commentary (or perhaps have multiple editorials based on the same "scaffolding")?

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In print journalism, you're supposed to include information in descending order of importance. As a reader, you're expected to stop reading once you get to details you don't really care about, confident that you won't miss something more important buried farther down.

That's largely true for hard news stories. But what about news feats or op-eds or sports profiles, where the traditional inverted pyramid structure isn't employed?

Exactly. Feature stories often use a delayed lead to set the scene or catch the reader's attention.

While I can understand the arguments for this, in practice the approach frustrates me to no end.

Worse are authors whose writing has no excerptable lede. Gina Kolata and mumber Morgenstern (health / Well articles in the NY Times) especially do this.

I find some old-school journos -- Dan Gilmore particularly comes to mind, I've called out a few others in G+ posts -- still practice strong ledes and heads. Many newer ones start with "My latest at <some website somewhere> read more".

Which ... tells me fucking nothing.

Lede with your lede. Trail with your link or call-to-action.

this seems to be a lost art, unfortunately.

The so-called "inverted pyramid". I'm finding it applied less and less frequently.

I've also noted that it's become pretty much standard practice for news bureaus to write single-sentence paragraphs. Literally, every sentence of a story is its own paragraph. I don't know when that became standard practice, but sometime in the later 1990s or 2000s, particularly as stories moved online.

Zinsser mentions this one sentence paragraph thing in "How to Write Well", citing an AP article from 1993. (In the "Paragraphs" section of Chapter 10.)

Thanks. And yes, it makes sense that it would be AP style or similar.

Sadly, hardly anyone writing now outside big traditional media orgs has done any sort of formal journalism training.

That's ... not all bad.

I think there's too much insularity within much of the journo community. But many of the newcomers are also subject to outside influences which call their credibility strongly into question. Lack of uniform copyediting, for better or worse, means a wide range of writing quality.

Though I'm seeing that even in long-standing brands -- NY Times, Forbes, and elsewhere.

>Forget about editors, use this kind of mark-up for your readers. Imagine changing an in-depth article into a truncated, 200-word summary with the click of a button.

I imagine it, and most users would still not care. They skim articles anyway.

Actually, this is an extremely simplified example, and once you get into the nitty gritty, it becomes a lot more difficult to add/remove various elements. For instance, you might need to capitalize a word differently depending on whether something has been excised immediately before it, or you may need to adjust punctuation in ways that you can't do simply using an XML-like format. Really, you need what amounts to a Natural Language Generation library to implement a robust system.

I implemented that for my blog somewhere around 2001 or so. It's quite tedious to write and I haven't done it since around 2001 or so. Even two versions of a story is a lot.

I did something like this in college, and I was thinking semantic annotations would be an editorial pass like copyediting. These days you'd probably let some ML system take a crack at it before using human effort to bring the quality up to your publication's standard. In any case, it doesn't have to get in the way of writing a good story.

You can do this with lisp-style syntax (which also (despite opinions to the contrary) is quite natural).

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