[medstrom]

This puzzled me until I realized you're talking about mainstream news-type sites. I agree on that, but these barely qualify as writing in the first place, since none of the traditional goals apply. It's like if the only kind of video you've seen are ads and you then proceed to complain about the info density of video as a whole. Though most video on YouTube also sucks, some things are very well expressed in video, like the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth or Blue Planet II.

For me "long-form writing" brings to mind textbooks, LWN, some bug report emails, some HN comments. These are a different category of writing. I don't think you should sit around to wait for someone else to summarize these for you -- that attitude must be terrible for you in the long run.

[golergka]

A lot of books are just as bad, especially mainstream non-fiction. May be it's because they're typically written by journalists, but I often see the same awful New Yorker style of spending three pages on a personal story of some scientist in an article about quantum physics.

[gary_0]

That's Sturgeon's Law[0]. Most writing isn't very good, and most writers irritate readers with paragraphs of navel-gazing that tries and fails at being profound.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law