Branko and Emily, the fact that you didn't immediately "get" many of the points raised in the article the first time you read it (and felt the need to parse and correct it) is the ironic QED of the piece: It's about an insular scene you're not (and are, maybe, better off for not being) part of.
I found this because I googled “honor levy” after reading that NYT piece as an attempt to understand at least one thing in that article. I’m relieved that there isn’t something wrong with my reading comprehension after all, even though that fear that creeps into my thoughts every time I read something non-newsy like this in NYT. I like your rewrites so much better, and it makes me wonder why pieces aren’t written more accessibly. Feels like a purposeful way to alienate readers? Anyway, thanks for this perspective!
Fortunately, the extent of this trend in discourse has incorporated headlines and other click-bait. If a headline is beyond my semantic reach, I pass on the article. Thereby we maintain a heterogeneous language and a homomorphic self-partitioned society.
The internet killed newspaper and magazine quality. Free news from the internet and the perceived opportunities of online advertising cut into newspaper profits, and therefore newspaper staff. The first positions to die were the copy editors. Or maybe it was the proofreaders. Or the fact-checkers. Either way, papers and magazines still felt the need to compete, probably more keenly than ever. At some point writers needed to be on Twitter and at least keep an eye on other social media. So the need to produce content to keep up remained the same or went up. The realities of keeping up with the internet/social media without extra pay cut into content creation or quality control time. At many places, the entire layer of quality control workers was cut to protect profits. Result: a drop in quality. Another part of this is that the internet forced publications to compete against outlets they never had to compete against before. First it was just local newspapers or magazines suddenly having to compete against regional or national newspapers. And early on the news was free. How were the smaller publications that relied on the AP for all of their state, national and international news going to compete with the NY Times or the Washington Post now that their subscribers had easy access to those newspapers? Or the AP itself? The easier technology made it for online publications to target people with advertising, the worse it got for local and regional newspapers. Not only could you read a better story online, you could get the same ads. Then newspapers had to compete with non-print outlets like CNN's video or even text articles. More trouble. Aggregators who offered curated streams of just the news you wanted was another blow. Then social media became the biggest place people got news and it was vetted by people you trusted even if you ended up reading the BBC instead of the NY Times, or god forbid your hometown paper. Back when every two-paper town became a one-paper town newspapers showed they'd cut quality to maintain profits (there was a study and an exception to prove the rule). They did it again, and are continuing to do it. The truly terrible part of this is that it fed into the concentration of major news outlets into fewer and fewer corporations, so reporters had to start cutting their standards so the company could stay competitive. A politican's or celebrity's PR person could put conditions on an interview that no self-respecting reporter would have agreed to before. But now they needed access to stay afloat, so they swallowed the conditions and became more of an outlet for others than gatekeepers and reporters of the truth. Drama was suddenly way more important because it sold better. And so standards decline and quality deteriorates.
The effect is selected for. You're supposed to feel like you're almost but not quite plugged in. This keeps you reading so that you can infer the correct shibboleths from reading enough of these 'articles'.
I received magazine in the mail the other day and was blown away at how well written and presented it was and realized that in the ancient world of magazines this was the norm. These days people are so obsessed with flooding social media with content that trigger SEO that clarity and insightfulness are way down on the list of priorities.
While the Hemingway app isn't a great way to determine anything other than how closely the writing resembles Hemingway's, I do see your point. The "good news" is that any piece with a first sentence like this example can be safely skipped. I've been doing it since about 2015 when this style became ubiquitous enough to train the machine-learning model in my head. It now predicts that when text-parsing effort is high like that, statistically I am unlikely to be rewarded for my efforts.
Take pity on the poor Times though: It's hard to see the world from so far up their own ass! Also, surely you can't expect the CIA operatives who produce their content to be great writers too?! In all seriousness I do think the Times has parroted enough lies on behalf of the military-industrial complex, and has sufficiently betrayed liberalism, that they deserve extreme skepticism and/or indifference.
Stop hiring former BuzzFeed writers? I thought the entire purpose of Buzzfeed was to incubate baby NYT writers.
Branko and Emily, the fact that you didn't immediately "get" many of the points raised in the article the first time you read it (and felt the need to parse and correct it) is the ironic QED of the piece: It's about an insular scene you're not (and are, maybe, better off for not being) part of.
I found this because I googled “honor levy” after reading that NYT piece as an attempt to understand at least one thing in that article. I’m relieved that there isn’t something wrong with my reading comprehension after all, even though that fear that creeps into my thoughts every time I read something non-newsy like this in NYT. I like your rewrites so much better, and it makes me wonder why pieces aren’t written more accessibly. Feels like a purposeful way to alienate readers? Anyway, thanks for this perspective!
Thanks! Yeah, you're not crazy. It's just style over substance I guess.
Fortunately, the extent of this trend in discourse has incorporated headlines and other click-bait. If a headline is beyond my semantic reach, I pass on the article. Thereby we maintain a heterogeneous language and a homomorphic self-partitioned society.
The internet killed newspaper and magazine quality. Free news from the internet and the perceived opportunities of online advertising cut into newspaper profits, and therefore newspaper staff. The first positions to die were the copy editors. Or maybe it was the proofreaders. Or the fact-checkers. Either way, papers and magazines still felt the need to compete, probably more keenly than ever. At some point writers needed to be on Twitter and at least keep an eye on other social media. So the need to produce content to keep up remained the same or went up. The realities of keeping up with the internet/social media without extra pay cut into content creation or quality control time. At many places, the entire layer of quality control workers was cut to protect profits. Result: a drop in quality. Another part of this is that the internet forced publications to compete against outlets they never had to compete against before. First it was just local newspapers or magazines suddenly having to compete against regional or national newspapers. And early on the news was free. How were the smaller publications that relied on the AP for all of their state, national and international news going to compete with the NY Times or the Washington Post now that their subscribers had easy access to those newspapers? Or the AP itself? The easier technology made it for online publications to target people with advertising, the worse it got for local and regional newspapers. Not only could you read a better story online, you could get the same ads. Then newspapers had to compete with non-print outlets like CNN's video or even text articles. More trouble. Aggregators who offered curated streams of just the news you wanted was another blow. Then social media became the biggest place people got news and it was vetted by people you trusted even if you ended up reading the BBC instead of the NY Times, or god forbid your hometown paper. Back when every two-paper town became a one-paper town newspapers showed they'd cut quality to maintain profits (there was a study and an exception to prove the rule). They did it again, and are continuing to do it. The truly terrible part of this is that it fed into the concentration of major news outlets into fewer and fewer corporations, so reporters had to start cutting their standards so the company could stay competitive. A politican's or celebrity's PR person could put conditions on an interview that no self-respecting reporter would have agreed to before. But now they needed access to stay afloat, so they swallowed the conditions and became more of an outlet for others than gatekeepers and reporters of the truth. Drama was suddenly way more important because it sold better. And so standards decline and quality deteriorates.
The effect is selected for. You're supposed to feel like you're almost but not quite plugged in. This keeps you reading so that you can infer the correct shibboleths from reading enough of these 'articles'.
Good call.
I received magazine in the mail the other day and was blown away at how well written and presented it was and realized that in the ancient world of magazines this was the norm. These days people are so obsessed with flooding social media with content that trigger SEO that clarity and insightfulness are way down on the list of priorities.
While the Hemingway app isn't a great way to determine anything other than how closely the writing resembles Hemingway's, I do see your point. The "good news" is that any piece with a first sentence like this example can be safely skipped. I've been doing it since about 2015 when this style became ubiquitous enough to train the machine-learning model in my head. It now predicts that when text-parsing effort is high like that, statistically I am unlikely to be rewarded for my efforts.
Take pity on the poor Times though: It's hard to see the world from so far up their own ass! Also, surely you can't expect the CIA operatives who produce their content to be great writers too?! In all seriousness I do think the Times has parroted enough lies on behalf of the military-industrial complex, and has sufficiently betrayed liberalism, that they deserve extreme skepticism and/or indifference.
Are people on average becoming less experienced, or dumber? The latter, I'd say.
What seems like every damn article in many papers.
Can we get a plot of writer salary vs Hemingway score from 1980 to the present? I expect a correlation.