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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

Got through the first 3 paragraphs where the title hadn't even been acknowledge, let alone answered, and stopped reading.

Increasing I find storytelling in journalism to be less and less tolerable. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely a place for long form non-fiction. If this were titled in such a way that it were to be a story and not a fact-piece I would probably have less of a problem with it; I could have filed it away in a to-read-later bookmark.

But when the title elicits that there is information to be had; I want that information, and nothing else.

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The whole article is about how empathy and a safe place to speak up make a better team.

But as usual for nytimes journalists, the reading is barely tolerable.

That's my understanding as well. Perhaps the author wanted the reader to empathize with the people in the article?

Seems reasonable, but perhaps it might be premature, given the premise is that we have some problems empathizing in certain contexts. Maybe this is one of them.

I skimmed the entire article and it just kept teasing and teasing but seemingly never revealed the promised information. If it's in there at all, it's well hidden.

Here's the TL;DR

After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female, introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the “group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other. There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.

1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call, ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams had low sensitivity amongst the team members.

Thanks for the TLDR.. that's almost Feynmanesque..

That's really unfortunate and naive. Not everything, particularly the subtle dynamics of human interaction, can be succinctly distilled into an abstract-style paragraph. Oftentimes it takes great writing skill to set right perspective, context, and background for the information to make sense or "click" - perspective which I find to be more valuable than the raw "information" or study results.

Storytelling is sometimes the only way to properly convey information.

- slightly edited for clarity -

Read my other comment; the title didn't convey this subtlety so I didn't expect the article to.

I enjoyed listening to the book "Smarter Faster Better" in which this article is one of the chapters.

http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Smarter-Faster-Better-Aud...

It also deals with how the script of movie "Frozen" evolved and I found that very interesting as well. It showcases how your idea gets better & better for execution because of the team.

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.

I think this is like learning styles, different people need different communication methods.

Storytelling is NEVER the ONLY way to convey information, though it can be the MOST EFFICIENT. Specifically, the narrative form tends to be more memorable/impactful than disconnected propositions, so if the majority of the context in the story is necessary to understand the information, it ends up being a net win.

You remember the concept of a thesis statement? This author didn't.

That first anecdote in the article is relevant, and the article does eventually get to talking about Google. This is the nature of long-form, it doesn't have to dive straight in.

> This is the nature of long-form

Let's not confuse long-form "there's a lot to be said here" with long-form "we really like padding".

"The story of computing begins roughly 4000 years ago..."

There is so much content online, and readers are so fickle that it makes too much sense to me for writers to be as concise and straight to the point as possible. I read the article on the subway train so I didn't have much else to do but if this was a tab I was glancing over at work I wouldn't have made it past the first paragraph.

There are different reading modes. The New York Times Magazine in particular caters to people who are sitting down on a quiet day for long reads. It was created specifically to hold pieces longer than appropriate for the normal newspaper.

So here, it definitely doesn't make sense for writers to be as straight-to-the-point as possible. It's like asking for some long, cinematic movie (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia or The Revenant) to be edited down to a 60-second YouTube video. Sure, you could squeeze in the highlights, but it would miss the point.

Sometimes you want a grab-and-go sandwich from a drive-through. Sometimes you want a relaxed 2-hour meal with old friends.

Fair enough. Didn't know about NYT's target demographic.

Titles are important. They not only tell you what an article is about, but also the form the article takes.

Using "What" in the title was a mistake here. When you see "What" you expect mostly facts, mostly findings. If they had titled it with "How" I would have been more prepared for a lack of immediate answer. "How" denotes that an explanation is needed, and backstory is often necessary in explaining.

Titles are especially important on the web because links only have titles. There's no other context to which you can get an idea of what you're getting into. It's not like in newspapers where you have the context of what section an article is in or visually see how long it is from a glance.

If you're looking for ways to prepare, at the top of the page, it also says, "The New York Times Magazine", which has been known for long-form journalism for more than 100 years.

Yeah, this has been driving me crazy lately. Reminds me of local news. "Important information for parents. Find out the dangerous thing that may be hurting your kids.". But we're not going to tell you. We'll keep teasing it over and over. It's really important, but we really don't care if you get the info.

I'm glad someone else shares my frustration with long form journalism these days. Your thesis should always be clear from your first paragraph. I read some of these articles and I'm half way through and I still don't know what the point is.

Yes, but they aren't nearly as bad as the new yorker. A few weeks ago, I started to read this article on the hiroshima bombs and it started out awesome. However, after the few first paragraphs, they start going off on the life stories for each of the characters while adding tons of extraneous details. I gave up in frustration after 10 minutes of that crap. That's happened to me almost every time i go there so now I usually just autofilter new yorker articles out.

I've been trying to think of a new term for this type of writing as it's not quite clickbait but I haven't come up with anything quite as catchy.

That's actually an incredible article that started the whole long-form news trend (1946). The New Yorker dedicated the entire issue to the story, and it's been republished as a book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)

I'd recommend you try and read it again.

Sounds like you're referring to "Hiroshima", published as the entire editorial content of an issue of the New Yorker shortly after the war, later published as a book of the same title, and IMHO one of the most important magazine articles ever written. (For instance, here's an entire web site about that article: http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/index.php)

This is why I (often) check the comments first

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