[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.