What pitiful writing. I’ve read this a couple times and am appalled with the writing. Can’t figure out what is being said other than two men were killed in a tandem parachute jump.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/3167368/skydivers-dead-tandem-jump-australia/

It reads as if they're talking to a small child with short, simple sentences. IMO it's an artifact of The Sun being a tabloid - it has to cater to the lowest common denominator in its audience.

That said, it's The Sun, what did you expect ?

BTW, since you're an admin: you might want to disable this account here, it's credentials are available on bugmenot.com: http://bugmenot.com/view/simhq.com

It's the Sun. If you want non-awful writing, look elsewhere.

The Sun, nuff said!

The Sun is where you go when the Daily Mail is just too high-falutin'

Journalism fail? There's PLENTY of that to go around but then again, the news media complex is doling out what the masses want so that must mean the masses are just blathering idiots.

The average reading age of the human species is around 9. Papers like the Sun cater for readers of below average reading age. They are written for a reading age of around 8. If they weren't they wouldn't sell any papers.

https://guerrillaworking.com/2019/05/06/the-average-reading-age-is/

https://www.see-a-voice.org/marketing-ad/effective-communication/readability/

https://literacytrust.org.uk/inform...glands-literacy-compare-other-countries/

What I find really annoying is the repetition in the reporting. You have the main description in the top picture which is then repeated at the beginning of the paragraph. I've also seen it for a third time in the actual article. Quite honestly I find modern journalism to be of a very poor standard. Local on-line news is probably the worst.

The repetition thing also plagues TV programmes. Always repeats what happened previously after the commercial break. I'm glad I don't have to suffer the TV too often.

I can only speak for my country but the vast majority of US journalists are now either social justice warriors and/or entertainers. That's the fundamental problem.


If you want to be informed and educated then you need to dig and do your research if you want to find a decent news source.

That is is because people have a very short memory, even if the break is only for a couple of minutes.

What I don't like is the sensationalism required for TV ratings, CNN, for example.

The masses want to be entertained as if they are watching a circus or a really bad car wreck.

The Romans got it absolutely right more than 2,000 years ago.

Probably many causes for the general downtrend in journalistic quality, 24/7 news means that highly repetitive looping of already padded out content is now practically a basic feature of news. Gone are the days where you got your news at regular times for x minutes (barring news flashes) and for some countries the requirement for neutrality in tone is also removed. So yeah, it's now highly repetitive, lowest common denominator and opinioned, cherry picked and partisan. Hey now that I write it, it follows children channels pattern of behaviour

Excellent post DM.

What I found so bad was the inaccuracies. For instance:

Why did it say the airplane was “in difficulty”. Nothing else about that.

Says parachutists were found dead on the runway. Then it says landed near the runway. Confusing use of landing. Did it mean the parachutists or the plane?

Says the men fell from the plane as it was landing near the runway. Landing near the runway; why ?



Just a terrible confusion of conflicting statements.

The Sun doesn't do journalism, it does attention grabbing scare mongering hackery designed to sell papers by getting emotions (usually anger/fear/disgust/etc) going. Inaccuracies are just part and parcel of it.

I firmly believe that news outlets should be forced to publish retractions and corrections on the same page with the same prominence as the original article.
So if Newspaper X publishes a front page story saying "Mr Y is a horrible whatsit", and it turns out Mr Y is not, in fact, a horrible whatsit the next front page will be a retraction and apology. I'm pretty confident that would improve accuracy standards very quickly.

+1


I'm sure everyone remembers the Air National Guard/Bush story fiasco from "60 Minutes".

Right alongside the bungled Trump interview by Lesley Stahl

Ok. Let’s try to leave the overt political issues out of it.

The quality of journalism graduates has declined immensely--I blame smartphone texting technology.

I have no idea if this is the case here, but you're all aware that a significant chunk of news stories online these days are written by bots? Even if there's an "author's" name at the top...