Comment by StavrosK
4 years ago
What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.
4 years ago
What's with the fad where articles start by describing how a random person overpacked? It's such a cliche by now, yet I see it everywhere.
>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.
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.)
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?
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?
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.
But... you forgot to share your grandmother's recipe for making lemonade!
Thanks for writing it, whether in no, half or full jest - I appreciated it.
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Go on..
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.
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.
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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.