I wish stories like this were a more straight forward counting of the interesting facts and relevant input from experts. I don't really need the origin story of the conference this finding was discussed at.
I agree. I feel like they are taking "story" too literally now. Science news is soon approaching the level of superfluous meandering of online recipes. I'm not saying I don't care about the context, but a news article should be different to a short story. And, I still think there is a place for these things, but not for all articles, only some.
The stuff you're complaining about seems limited to a little bit of POV text in the first seven (!) sentences of a rather long article. Does it really bug you so much that they gave you just a tiny taste of the perspective of a woman who works on this stuff? That seems a bit much. This kind of text is everywhere in science journalism.
I likewise do not like the front loaded flavor text.
A good news article should be written in order of priority. Each word, each sentence should be written in order of decreasing priority starting with the headline. "JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe" is a great headline, it encompasses the entire story. Especially at the beginning of the article, the purpose should be expand and clarify the most important pieces.
I really dislike the kind of journalism that goes into biography mode and starts off with an anecdote about Jane Einstein's childhood dog leaving the most relevant bits 2/3 the way through.
I'd like to be able to choose the level of detail I get from an article by being able to stop when I'm done.
I don't like having to dedicate several minutes to finding a piece of information that took several seconds to deliver. Much like the 10 minute youtube howto video hiding the five seconds of information I needed.
I utterly despise the current “long form” style where all long form stories start by talking about something old and unimportant.
Sure it’s a nice appetizer to whet the palette. But only if I already know I’m gonna read the whole thing! There’s too much long form for me to read. I want a tastier first bite to see if it’s worth my time.
The first spate of articles from this publication were like this, which really made it stand apart from the others. Somehow a complete inversion has taken place since then.
English text transformation is a task it’s exceptionally good at. You just need to prompt it to only use the source material you give it for summarization.
Guilty as charged! But to be fair, this applies to human writing too:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
