>What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked?
Fyi, it's not a fad. It's what's called a "human interest" angle and some publications (like this rrj.ca website of this thread) have that editorial allowance for personal storytelling. (I made a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673)
More examples of that include "The New Yorker", "Harper's" and other literary style magazines.
The opposite examples of "just the facts" type of publishers would be "lwn.net" for Linux tech articles or The Economist magazine for business stories. You won't find articles beginning with personal things like, "When I was a little boy, my father took me to discover ice...blah blah blah...."
The problem is that HN is an aggregation site that gets the [human interest] articles when some readers don't want it and we have no convention for tagging them to avoid annoying that subset of the audience.
Hmm, that's informative, thanks. I agree there's an expectation mismatch, but I also find the writing in those articles a bit formulaic. I guess I'm mostly annoyed because I'm expecting a "just the facts" style and getting "human interest" instead, but it's fair that there are people who prefer that style.
I'm seriously thinking about a series of blog posts kind of diving a little bit into how news comes together. Any particular topics youre interested in?
Although I'd argue The Economist, while not having that form of literary style, does favor wordplay of various types so it's not really a great "just the facts" example. (Not a criticism in that I like their style in general.)
Have to pad those word counts when you're paid for length. If you don't have eyeballs on your website for X amount of time per visit, how are advertisers to know they got their money's worth?
This particular investigative journalist is over-preparing for interacting with sources. That is a literary device to color his avoidance of the services named in the headline.
We're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?
Communication is about co: sharing information that is wanted to be sent and wanted to be received. Readers aren't meant to be a captive audience for shaggy dog tales. The article is on the review of Journalism website, not a storytelling website.
Overpacking a story with junk (how ironic!) makes it harder to spread the important ideas of the article, which hurts the author's goal.
Oh, you know the author's goal? Likewise, if it was published on the site - arguably the curators read the article and approved it - but because it doesn't fit your own expectations of the only kind of content you want there, then it's inappropriate? That sounds like gatekeeping and perhaps perfectionism.
Different people like different things. Rather than assuming the author, the editor, and various other reviewers are all idiots, perhaps consider that you are not representative of their typical audience.
That's a good point. I feel like there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories. I don't know whether they'd read the article if it didn't come with a somewhat relatable story.
Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority?
To me, these articles look like those SEO recipe sites that are stuffed with random content because Google won't rank them as well if they just provided what the user is looking for.
> there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories
This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
Certainly not always, sometimes you need the story context because it's about some particular thing happening.
But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
I get the impression that there are multiple things at work: some people really like those side-stories, and they're very easy to write. You'd have a much, much harder time filling a newspaper with facts, which makes it much more expensive.
> for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
Depending on who you are, those details could be important. If chemical X is known to be harmful, it opens up details into how Suzy and Michael got exposed and who exposed them. Is this a local problem or a national one? Are there alternative explanations for the bad things that have nothing to do with chemical X? The human interest details, meanwhile, clue you into socioeconomic and demographic factors which may be at play. (But also may not.)
These sorts of stories are surfacing anecdotes. Hopefully fact-checked anecdotes. But not peer-reviewed papers, either. (All that said, I personally prefer publications that tend towards terseness.)
> But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
That's a very specific story then, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about "eating poison is not good for humans". Suzy and Michael are humans, therefore eating poison is not good for them, but they could be replaced with any other human: they specifically don't add anything to the story. They're an emotional connection for the reader at best and a filler at worst.
Indeed. To me, it's the age-old form vs function dichotomy. I have resigned myself long ago to the fact that most people choose form over function every time.
I found it's very liberating to consciously decide "this isn't intended for me" and focus my attention elsewhere. Still, it's very easy to lower my guard and fall into the mindless consumer trap again. But it's an indulgence, and I try to limit my intake.
When I go to bed, I think about how I’m going to wake up next morning and have a hot cup of coffee, a marvelous breakfast and brush my teeth before sitting in the comfy armchair that I have next to the couch in my medium-sized living room. Then, when I wake up, I do all those things that I have in mind that I went to bed with, that I dreamed about while sleeping in my large wooden bed that I inherited from my grandmother who is not with us anymore.
I loved my grandmother, we’ve spent such a great time together as we used to do our daily walks in the green park in front of our house and we watched all those dogs running around and birds chirping, while enjoying our ice-cream that we had acquired from the shop around the corner.
Then I wake up, and I go on Hacker News to read about all those interesting and innovative things that happen around me all the time, while my little dog wags his tail and watches me as I click every link on the front page.
I try to add as much “human” as possible into my writing and tech interaction.
I feel that we have allowed technology to leech our humanity, and the consequences have been devastating.
When we have people running multi-billion-node datasets, that have no empathy for the essential “humanity” of each node, we can have Jurassic-scale disasters.
>What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked?
Fyi, it's not a fad. It's what's called a "human interest" angle and some publications (like this rrj.ca website of this thread) have that editorial allowance for personal storytelling. (I made a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673)
More examples of that include "The New Yorker", "Harper's" and other literary style magazines.
The opposite examples of "just the facts" type of publishers would be "lwn.net" for Linux tech articles or The Economist magazine for business stories. You won't find articles beginning with personal things like, "When I was a little boy, my father took me to discover ice...blah blah blah...."
The problem is that HN is an aggregation site that gets the [human interest] articles when some readers don't want it and we have no convention for tagging them to avoid annoying that subset of the audience.
Hmm, that's informative, thanks. I agree there's an expectation mismatch, but I also find the writing in those articles a bit formulaic. I guess I'm mostly annoyed because I'm expecting a "just the facts" style and getting "human interest" instead, but it's fair that there are people who prefer that style.
Any good sources on this kind of media "sausage making" meta detail?
I'm seriously thinking about a series of blog posts kind of diving a little bit into how news comes together. Any particular topics youre interested in?
Although I'd argue The Economist, while not having that form of literary style, does favor wordplay of various types so it's not really a great "just the facts" example. (Not a criticism in that I like their style in general.)
Have to pad those word counts when you're paid for length. If you don't have eyeballs on your website for X amount of time per visit, how are advertisers to know they got their money's worth?
> how a random person overpacked
This particular investigative journalist is over-preparing for interacting with sources. That is a literary device to color his avoidance of the services named in the headline.
Can a cliche be a fad?
> Can a cliche be a dad?
This particular cliche has grandkids by now.
We're story tellers with lives, perhaps it allows a person to feel like they're more than a cog in a wheel existing just to please some impatient internet stranger?
Communication is about co: sharing information that is wanted to be sent and wanted to be received. Readers aren't meant to be a captive audience for shaggy dog tales. The article is on the review of Journalism website, not a storytelling website.
Overpacking a story with junk (how ironic!) makes it harder to spread the important ideas of the article, which hurts the author's goal.
Oh, you know the author's goal? Likewise, if it was published on the site - arguably the curators read the article and approved it - but because it doesn't fit your own expectations of the only kind of content you want there, then it's inappropriate? That sounds like gatekeeping and perhaps perfectionism.
Different people like different things. Rather than assuming the author, the editor, and various other reviewers are all idiots, perhaps consider that you are not representative of their typical audience.
That's a good point. I feel like there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories. I don't know whether they'd read the article if it didn't come with a somewhat relatable story.
Unfortunately, many large media companies have adopted the story-first-facts-second strategy. Are those who prefer otherwise such a tiny minority?
To me, these articles look like those SEO recipe sites that are stuffed with random content because Google won't rank them as well if they just provided what the user is looking for.
> there's essentially two groups: those that want the information and are annoyed by the stories, and those who want the stories
This assumes information can always be cleanly severed from the story. That strikes me like cutting a paper down to the abstract and conclusion. Yes, the methods may be tedious to get through, but someone with an understanding of them sees the problem with more depth.
Certainly not always, sometimes you need the story context because it's about some particular thing happening.
But for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
I get the impression that there are multiple things at work: some people really like those side-stories, and they're very easy to write. You'd have a much, much harder time filling a newspaper with facts, which makes it much more expensive.
> for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
Depending on who you are, those details could be important. If chemical X is known to be harmful, it opens up details into how Suzy and Michael got exposed and who exposed them. Is this a local problem or a national one? Are there alternative explanations for the bad things that have nothing to do with chemical X? The human interest details, meanwhile, clue you into socioeconomic and demographic factors which may be at play. (But also may not.)
These sorts of stories are surfacing anecdotes. Hopefully fact-checked anecdotes. But not peer-reviewed papers, either. (All that said, I personally prefer publications that tend towards terseness.)
> But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
That's a very specific story then, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about "eating poison is not good for humans". Suzy and Michael are humans, therefore eating poison is not good for them, but they could be replaced with any other human: they specifically don't add anything to the story. They're an emotional connection for the reader at best and a filler at worst.
Valid point! Oddly enough, I'd rather read a bunch of comments _about_ the alleged article than actually _read the article_.
Perhaps if someone wrote a blog in nested-comment style I would read it.
Fun though experiment: could Harry Potter be rewritten in comment style?
Indeed. To me, it's the age-old form vs function dichotomy. I have resigned myself long ago to the fact that most people choose form over function every time.
I found it's very liberating to consciously decide "this isn't intended for me" and focus my attention elsewhere. Still, it's very easy to lower my guard and fall into the mindless consumer trap again. But it's an indulgence, and I try to limit my intake.
When I go to bed, I think about how I’m going to wake up next morning and have a hot cup of coffee, a marvelous breakfast and brush my teeth before sitting in the comfy armchair that I have next to the couch in my medium-sized living room. Then, when I wake up, I do all those things that I have in mind that I went to bed with, that I dreamed about while sleeping in my large wooden bed that I inherited from my grandmother who is not with us anymore.
I loved my grandmother, we’ve spent such a great time together as we used to do our daily walks in the green park in front of our house and we watched all those dogs running around and birds chirping, while enjoying our ice-cream that we had acquired from the shop around the corner.
Then I wake up, and I go on Hacker News to read about all those interesting and innovative things that happen around me all the time, while my little dog wags his tail and watches me as I click every link on the front page.
Thank you for reading this.
Thanks for writing it, whether in no, half or full jest - I appreciated it.
I concur.
I try to add as much “human” as possible into my writing and tech interaction.
I feel that we have allowed technology to leech our humanity, and the consequences have been devastating.
When we have people running multi-billion-node datasets, that have no empathy for the essential “humanity” of each node, we can have Jurassic-scale disasters.
But... you forgot to share your grandmother's recipe for making lemonade!