[KMnO4]

This is also standard journalism practice, and I use it all the time as a somewhat heuristic for news article credibility.

Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an article, and the least important at the end. This is tradition from print newspapers, where your article would be cut if the editor didn't have enough space. Sometimes only the first paragraph would make it into print, so you'd better make sure all the important details are in there.

If I'm reading an article and it doesn't have all the important information before the fold, there's a high probability (in my experience) that other issues exist (eg shoddy sources or plain factual errors).

[chmod775]

> Journalists are taught to put the most important details at the head of an article

In online journalism practice many do the exact opposite. They make you read paragraph after paragraph of speculations and bullshit before elaborating/explaining their click bait headline. Anything to make you stay and scroll so their ads get more screen time.

[gumby]

Relating to another HN submission today about site optimization: my brain interprets this as "a slow loading site" and I just abandon the page after the first paragraph or two (exception: some private blog pages).

Then again I started reading print newspapers about 40 years ago and this was also the approach for reading the paper so I learned a long time ago to be parsimonious with my time.

[greggman3]

I stopped reading several links from HN today when it was clear the author wasn't getting to the point. If they had told me the point at the top I might or might not have continued to read but at least they would have gotten their point to across. As it is they got nothing across.

[pell]

SEO also has encouraged this.

[bonoboTP]

I wonder about the national differences. Hungarian news portals do as you said, jump straight in, lay out the overall idea, then go into details. Even for long form articles.

German news on the other hand, especially long form, starts from a very personal tone, sets up an emotional texture, introduces a person by name and makes them likable etc. till finally in the middle they get to the matter. It's really frustrating getting used to this.

I fell like the US is sort of in-between.

[pell]

The German articles you're describing sound more like long-form journalism. I think their style differs heavily from short news reports.

[bonoboTP]

It's not simply a function of the genre. I find that Hungarian investigative journalism articles tend to start with matter of fact things, like "we have uncovered the XYZ. As you may know, politician XYs connections came under scrutiny recently. We met an informer who..." While the German equivalem would start "we are sitting in a café just outside the Cathedral, as the cars wizz by on a rainy Tuesday. The documents are all prepared in a big red folder and Herr Schmidt looks at us perhaps a bit anxiously."

I'm not a writer, but that's the jist. They are often the same length, but German articles are much more pondering, feeling, moralizing, moody and focuses on personalities and making the reader be part of the story, like a novel.

In Hungary this is regarded more as beating around the bush. Just give us the facts and the actual story, like how the guy did his fraud etc, not the story of the journalist uncovering it etc. It's obviously not as extreme as I wrote above but strikingly noticeable.

[noir_lord]

It may be a cultural thing, my partner is Hungarian and she has your stereotypical programmers level of bluntness/intolerance of waffle.

She is (hilariously to me since I know her) direct but never rude, her family are all much the same.

[jjtheblunt]

i'm so happy reading that i'm not the only one using that criterion