this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 289 points 7 months ago (21 children)

I'm getting really tired of the word slammed, maybe writers need to pick up a thesaurus (it's a dinosaur that knows a lot of words).

[–] [email protected] 49 points 7 months ago (7 children)

I studied news journalism in college and they kinda hammered in that in news journalism it's more important to communicate information consistently and to target a wide audience than it is to make "good writing."

There are style guides you have to follow and words like "slammed" end up getting used a lot despite not quite being accurate because they're words that are used a lot.

The other thing is that usually the person writing the headlines isn't the journalist.. and sometimes they do a lot of versions of the same headline and when people click more because of the word slammed it ends up sticking.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

I've been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it's everywhere

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

yeah, unfortunately they need to make money to exist. And that creates all sorts of incentives that aren't great. I still like journalism and think it's an important part of a working society, but I decided pretty quickly after studying it that I didn't want to be part of it

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