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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I'm much less forgiving of the format. Every example I've seen has been a colossal and seemingly deliberate waste of the reader's (my) time. Even when it is reasonably skillfully written and contains information on a subject I'm interested in, I vastly prefer the writing style of, say, Wikipedia.

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When they combine these god-damned long form articles with clickbait titles it's that much worse.

At least clickbait spam content has the class to let you off the hook after 5 seconds.

You click on an article about MH370 or the Paris attacks or something, and the fourth paragraph is "Jean-Denis lives in a quiet suburb of Orlean with his two children and their dog, a basset hound golden retriever mix named Harmonie." Good god! It's the slow, lingering death by a thousand cuts.

Haha so true. And then the mix of chronology just to mix things up...

"But Jean-Denis didn't always live a comfortable life in the suburbs. The first seven years of his life he grew up with his grandparents in Transylvania. The potato crop wasn't always good, and the long winters taught him about patience. A trait he's been needing in the search for the MH370."

Why not just read for the pleasure of it? Do you every read anything from The New Yorker, or Esquire, or The Atlantic, etc.? There can be great stories that are enjoyable to read, while still being nonfiction.

No, I think GP is right. Compare a typical long-form piece to e.g. a textbook. A well-written textbook has much more information, but still organizes it in such a way so that you can quickly understand what you're getting into. By comparison, I find that long-form journalism typically buries this information so that even if there is a meaningful summary, you have to build it yourself (and obviously you can only do this after having spent the time to read it in the first place).

My point is that long-form journalism isn't pleasurable to read. The writing style is incredibly belabored, and I am fairly convinced that this is the intention of the authors. It clearly works for many readers, but not for me, and I wish there was always a clearer upfront distinction between traditional news articles and long-form articles.

English is my second language, and while I'm able to skim and read text very quickly, increased use of literary vocabulary puts me off very quickly. It feels like pulling the hand brake. These articles are that much more tiresome to read. Also the longer, convoluted arguments force me to read the thing word by word until I can get the gist.

Once I discover it's in fact a long-form article, I will space bar-skim to see if there is any merit, and stop reading in 99% of cases.

I read lots of novels for the sheer pleasure of it. But reading the news is different. I don't read it for the same reason I read novels; I read it because I want to find out what's going, and because learning interesting things is fun. I too find writing styles that don't optimize for those purposes in the news to be infuriating, and I agree with baddox that I would much rather read Wikipedia articles (of which I have read many, for hours on end) than meandering news stories.

Would it help if you think of it as a form of literature, rather than a means of devouring information by the most efficient means possible? It may still not be for you, and this may not be a good example of it, but it is a genre with purposes other than what you are assuming.

I'm probably a bit old-fashioned, but I think that the set 'literature' does not intersect with the set 'bounces a giant angled magenta byline in my face' (the "find a $100 smartphone" bit)

Actually, one question I used to like to ask people: "In bookshops, what qualifies a book to move from 'fiction' to 'literature'?" (yes, you can get poetry and whatnot in the literature section, but it's primarily fiction-based)

In the Strand, the section you're talking about is called "Literary Fiction." Since we're talking about sets:

  literature ⊃ literary fiction

There's plenty of literature that is not fiction.

Well, sure. 'Literature' is used for all kinds of things, from classic novels to poetry to scientific papers. But in (non-specialist) bookshops, it's primarily 'classic/good fiction' with some other stuff thrown in. Those shelves are usually marked 'Literature', not 'Literary Fiction'...

Yes, that's true, one definition of literature can be anything that is written. I'm not trying to have a semantic argument with you though. Use whatever words you want, but if you think of this long form journalism as a form of... let's call it art writing, then maybe it would make more sense. If you want to say that having magenta pull quotes makes it not art then I can't help you.

Do you really don't see any value in a long form piece like you'd find in The New Yorker? I'm not saying that's all gold - it's easy to screw up and some topics simply don't need it, but if well done, I often find myself not being able to stop reading.

Then read Wikipedia.

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