[Tommek]

Why do these articles always start with a story about a person? I see this in nearly all articles from american news papers. It's strange.

Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount.

It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.

[campbellmorgan]

I stopped my subscription to the New Yorker because I got fed up with exactly this. Although, as others here have commented, it may more emotionally resonant to hear one person's story, it also reinforces a very American view of history that all changes good and bad are forged by individuals, not by motivated groups of people or larger stochastic events / underlying structural changes.

Repeated enough, it can create a narrative that the wider groups don't matter as long as you support the few exceptionals. This seems to play out across all sides of US society both in justice (think "headline" prosecution of corrupt individuals in finance etc) and in social welfare. This is not to say that exceptional individuals do not have a disproportionate role in society. They unquestionably do. However I can't think of any of those individuals who has not been enabled by dozens if not thousands of talented others.

[noobermin]

People are humans, they relate to individual stories more than raw statistics.

I think it's great, it shows there's always a human side to trends and large statistics.

[Tommek]

And that's how we get those "vaccines cause autism" mothers. They like stories more than statistics, too.

[anoncoward111]

Polemic. We also get stories like, "despite a strong economic recovery, John, 26, struggles to find a new job after being laid off."

[Tommek]

That's my point.

[cyborgx7]

If you only look at numbers and not individual stories, you miss the blind-spots of your data.

[drdaeman]

This means the numbers are meaningless and don't provide a good representation. Needs better data.

Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything. It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.

To remove the emotional part, just think of something from IT, like response times or test coverages. See, a story of an obscenely long API response (out of thousands) doesn't make much sense anymore. Debugging individual cases may even lead you on a completely wrong track. Unless you want to merely resolve that particular single request.

I'm sorry about the tone. Stories about others make humans relate (which is good), but they also have such undesirable effects (hype over facts, extrapolating, etc).

[Ntrails]

They aren't blind spots, they're outliers. If a change to medicare makes 99% of users significantly better off and 1% significantly worse, then it's a net good change. The useful reporting tells both sides, but simply telling the sobstory of one person really negatively impacted is worthless.

[anoncoward111]

Completely agree. Additionally, data segmentation is important. For example, if you segment employment data by college degree, you would see that overall employment has not risen at all for those without a college degree.

It's like saying the average net worth of Jeff Bezos and 99 homeless people is 1 billion USD, etc etc

[fooker]

Not if you are doing statistics properly.

[noobermin]

That's usually because the stories with "vaccines cause autism" don't bother with the statistics. This story does and discusses a real trend.

[Angostura]

Because it is a feature article, not a news or news analysis story. The latter types have a very different 'pyramidal structure' where the most salient facts are in the opening sentences and each subsequent paragraph adds less vital supporting information and colour. That story structure was specifically designed so that as different editions of the paper came out, if a story needed to be cut it could be essentially cut from the bottom in ever increasing amounts without it needing to be be re-written; in extremis being cut all the way back to the opening sentence, in which case it would simply be a 'news in brief' or Nib item.

Feature stories have typically attempted to hook the reader not through a news lead, but though a colour intro - and one technique is to introduce an abstract issue by relating it through a case-study. You may not like them, but when done well they can work.

Being done well, however means that the case study should be fairly short and there shouldn't be a mismatch between headline promising one thing and annoying the reader when the opening paragraphs don't deliver.

In traditional print, the combination of headline, subhead and design combined gives you an idea of the type of article you are about to read. However when the headline is simply posted as a link, it can feel like bait-and-switch. You go in expecting a pithy summary of the issues, you get a feature article.

This is a side effect of the way the story is posted, rather than a particular problem with the journalism, in my opinion, though I do think the initial anecdotage is a bit leisurely and meandering in this case, for my taste.

[cyborgx7]

That is what people are taught good journalism is. I agree, it's annoying and time consuming. It is disrespectful of my time as a reader.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You're not the only reader.

Most humans remember personal narratives far more efficiently than they parse data tables. Humans who don't operate like this are very much an exception.

So this is a communication technique - part of rhetoric, in fact. And communicating with median readers is what journalists are paid to do.

[cyborgx7]

I'm not arguing for removing all personal stories from journalistic articles. But if every single Article I read has a headline that I am interested in, but then asks me to read a long personal story before it will actually explain to me what the headline means, it will discourage me from reading articles. In fact, it already has.

Journalist aren't just paid to communicate with median readers, but with all readers. If close to all articles have the same format some readers will be put off by that.

I'm not arguing for removing all personal stories. Just for more of a balance.

[SolaceQuantum]

I feel like there’s some sort of connection here between how magazines are systematically and repeatedly not fulfilling your basic needs to absorb information by using a narrative and the articles description of how society is failing those in poverty with the narrative of “jobs==fixed poverty”.

[foobar1962]

Agreed. I got a couple of screen-scrolls through the article and gave up. It might be my attention span declining, to it could just be too much fluff in the story.

[mch82]

I attended a panel at Rights Con 2016 about getting tech stories picked up by the news. One tip from journalists on the panel was that articles anchored on a human narrative arc tend to be more successful. The human story helps people understand why it is worth investing time to learn the related facts/science/tech.

[WheelsAtLarge]

Many writers still get paid by the word or they get an assignment that requires X number of words.

Some of the worst offenders are magazine writers. I've read articles that go on and on and yet say nothing.

[nindalf]

This difference you've pointed out is starkest here, in 2 articles about the travel ban.

1. Trump’s Travel Ban, Aimed at Terrorists, Has Blocked Doctors - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/health/trump-travel-ban-d...

2. Trump’s Immigration Order Could Make It Harder To Find A Psychiatrist Or Pediatrician - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-immigration-orde...

Both of these are reports on exactly the same issue, but different techniques.

The NYTimes prefers to use pictures of a doctor, along with quotes from various doctors and medical students. "We need him desperately", says someone about an oncologist. "I love this country", says a Syrian doctor about America.

Fivethirtyeight tells the story with statistics. How many doctors are there in America? How many of those are immigrants? How many from these countries? All told in one image. Which specialties do these doctors practice? In which counties do they practice in? No human interest, just the facts.

Me personally, I prefer FiveThirtyEight's style. I read their article and that one image helped me realise what a grave issue it was. They get straight to the point, no fluff. But I totally understand how others might connect more with the NYTimes article. Seeing the story from the perspective of a real, breathing human. Hearing them talk about love, about sacrifice, about family. It humanises the issue and they understand it better. Different strokes.

[cm2187]

I think many journalists like to think themselves as writers. But this ain't a novel!

[mch82]

It’s also not an almanac, text book, or journal article though...

[vermooten]

It brings it alive - sounds corny, I know, but it's true. The article depressed me, which had it just been a piece about statistics and policy statements would have left me cold.

Interested to know why you're not interested in the human angle.

[Defero]

Yep... imo it's used to manipulate people. In this case it's good, but was also used as bad a bunch of times. So people that find motivation from this kind of story telling, can be manipulated