No, I'm with Touche here. Too many articles hide the actual story under a "human angle" aspect where we have to learn about someone's early childhood growing up in Soviet Russia, or their first failed business, or that time their father said Something Memorable to them. I've read so many of those now that I start to fall asleep before the article begins talking about whatever it is talking about. The naivety on display here is the journalists sticking hard-and-fast to the rules we're taught in middle school English class: you have to have a "hook" so that the audience get's caught! But those hooks are artificial and repetitive - let the content speak for itself. If it can't, then the article isn't worth my reading.
Anecdotes are still relevant. But using them religiously as the opening turns me away.
That's especially annoying since journalists should know better! It's them who have "golden standard" of the "inverted pyramid". I.e. a headline should be the "tl;dr" of the article. Then the first paragraph should be a little longer "tl;dr" of the article. The reader should be able to recursively learn more details, but also should be able to walk away with all the core facts after the very first paragraph.
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No, I'm with Touche here. Too many articles hide the actual story under a "human angle" aspect where we have to learn about someone's early childhood growing up in Soviet Russia, or their first failed business, or that time their father said Something Memorable to them. I've read so many of those now that I start to fall asleep before the article begins talking about whatever it is talking about. The naivety on display here is the journalists sticking hard-and-fast to the rules we're taught in middle school English class: you have to have a "hook" so that the audience get's caught! But those hooks are artificial and repetitive - let the content speak for itself. If it can't, then the article isn't worth my reading.
Anecdotes are still relevant. But using them religiously as the opening turns me away.
That's especially annoying since journalists should know better! It's them who have "golden standard" of the "inverted pyramid". I.e. a headline should be the "tl;dr" of the article. Then the first paragraph should be a little longer "tl;dr" of the article. The reader should be able to recursively learn more details, but also should be able to walk away with all the core facts after the very first paragraph.