[ravenstine]

> and uninteresting facts about the appearance of the scientist, like: 'Meis is a big man, almost a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered and bullet-headed with an exuberant laugh. Eyeing the boxes, though, he looks solemn.'

I'd seriously like to know how many of today's journalists were at one point creative writing majors, as it seems like every year we get more articles with this kind of narrative fluff.

Just look at the first paragraph:

> The glass-walled landscaping center on the road south of Nijmegen looks like a gardener’s dream of heaven. My fingers tingle as I thread my way through stands of soaring bamboo, drifts of asters, and lanes of rhododendrons, tempted to grab a trowel and forget what I’m here for.

It was a dark and stormy night...

So much "in depth" journalism today starts out with this kind of storytelling, and I'm sure that this is rationalized as a way of "grabbing the reader's attention", but I'm not sure it's doing the actual content of the story a service. It might grab the attention of casual readers, but somehow I doubt that people actually curious about science really want to sift through a bunch of words that basically say nothing.

[dieterrams]

This is almost certainly the result of how popular articles/books by Malcolm Gladwell, etc. have been, which goes back a long ways (The Tipping Point was published in 2000), rather than a prevalence of journalists who were creative writing majors.

The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.

[stubish]

> The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.

'Annoyingly common' is obvious. I would be interested in opinions from people in the industry if it is effective.

I know for a fact I can't bare to work my way through these style pieces; I'm also aware that there are publications that almost exclusively use it, so I'm guessing there is a large enough group of people who want to be told a story, rather than want to learn something. Is it a majority?

I notice a similar style issue in TV documentaries. Too often modern ones are about the presenter, with the majority of screen time showing the presenter, sometimes interacting with the actual subject but often enough just talking about themselves or unrelated subjects. Given that I think there is general consensus about what some of the great documentaries are, it seems that they are not even attempting to be good documentaries and are instead just attempting to make light entertainment.

[schoen]

I'd say there's been long-form journalism that people have appreciated for a long time that describes people, places, life history, and the journalist's impressions. For example, Berton Roueché and John McPhee have both written well-regarded long-form science journalism in The New Yorker that touches on some of these sorts of things, and not just "TLDR; it was lupus" or "apparently, making an atomic bomb no longer requires the resources that it once did". Both of them prominently featured the people who were responsible for discoveries or investigations and tried to give a sense of their stories and their character.

But maybe there's a trend toward too much purple prose in journalism over time, or maybe people specifically want a place to find out about important new discoveries in a less biographic or experiential way that still doesn't require much technical background.

[germinalphrase]

Human beings often find human beings interesting. Including human details often increases human interest in a technically focused story.

[chiefalchemist]

ravenstine 8 hours ago [-]

> "I'd seriously like to know how many of today's journalists were at one point creative writing majors, as it seems like every year we get more articles with this kind of narrative fluff."

I don't want to get off topic, but I wanted to respond to this. For many years I've been saying that the problem with the media is most journalists are actually "failed" English Lit majors. That is, without an adequate career path via Eng Lit many turn to journaliam.

The problem is fiction and journalism are polar opposites. Is it any wonder mainstream media is so unreliable? And untrusted?

[autokad]

i cant stand it. they should have a 'translate' button that removes all the crap for the readers who have no interest in that