Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

One claim Techcrunch makes that I'd disagree with is that the best reporters are responsible for most page views.

Looking at the "most read articles" list, there may be one or two news articles in it at a given time, but there are usually a few snarky op-eds (Dowd or Krugman) and at least a few human interest stories.

The standard for many of the non hard news stories seems to be to weave a story one quote at a time. So, for example, a story about the economic downturn might quote one person who lost a job saying "things have been really hard for the past few months" and then draw some grand conclusions without any quotes from legitimate experts, etc.

This is fine when it's a story about some human interest topic, but I imagine any serious journalist would never even want to write such articles.

The problem for traditional news organizations is that those are the articles people want, not some arcane investigative story.

For an example of this, compare "Most Read" to "Most Blogged" articles. The bloggers are typically focusing on the real news at any given time (a small handful of stories) and are less interested in the popular stuff (which is what they themselves are competing with)...

This is also why most papers run so many AP stories -- doing real journalism is much harder than just whipping up a quick story with a few loose quotes, etc.

> This is fine when it's a story about some human interest topic, but I imagine any serious journalist would never even want to write such articles.

Well, I'd say your imagination is slightly misleading, then. ;-) Of course, we may now debate what you mean by "serious journalists" but let's put that aside.

What every journalist wants, usually, is that his stories are read! Even you want to inform people you need them to read your story, first. One method is to write compelling headlines and teasers, for example. Sometimes, that's sufficient.

Another one, as you say, is to start with the "human side". But how you proceed, then, is often up to you: You may get deep into the topic, explore the problem behind the human story, write about pro's and con's, introducing the actors or stake holders, describe their opinions, and so on. Usually, you end by getting back to the human example you introduced in the beginning.

The simple truth is that every story has a human side. Nearly everything affects someone. If it doesn't, it's simply not interesting to anybody. It's not news.

Sure, there's also the common pieces, going after the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. That's the AP stuff. In contrast to want you believe, however, they are easier to write! It's just six questions you got to answer. Follow the Inverted Pyramid format and you're done.

Finding the human side, however, and making it believable and interesting is real work and takes quite a lot of time and experience.

Of course, you can't write every piece like that. Going into all the details of a story all the time would be boring and futile. So, both sorts have their place. But if you have something that's abstract, unexpected or hard to comprehend, starting with the human side is often the best way to go.

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