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The audience for the written paper is not less-than-high-school educated. Do you think the wording is at this level ?
Eg: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/09/08/pisa-202...
English version: https://mondediplo.com/
I would have imagined they would have been targeting less than high school literacy since their inception. At least the ones intended to be read by the masses. I'd actually expect that they target somewhere in the 4th-6th grade literacy range.
My local paper (basically a reprint of Gannett stories with a few local ones) tends to use a very basic vocabulary, often organizes stories as a set of questions/answers, or bullet point lists under a "What you need to know about..." headline.
When I think back to newspapers I read in high school (1980s) or even in the 1990s it wasn't at that low a level.
We were actually taught in journalism school to write straight-up news for a Grade 5 level audience. You could get fancy if you chose in opinion pieces.
To your second point, if it bleeds it leads. That's always been the case. Journalism is, and always has been, a business. A sensational news story of yesteryear is today's viral content. It's the same thing — both are desirable because they sell.
My town publishes city meeting minutes - "debated to change zoning regulations in [development], it passed 2-3". What changes were made? What were the debate points? Once I get that information who do I vote for/against in the next election if I care about the change.
I really want a local news paper that covers the above types of things. I can't find it and in turn I have no idea who to vote for. Town positions are partizan so I at least I know democrat/republican (for whatever that means...). I also know all candidates are married and have kids - and the family picture was taken by someone who knows how to make them look good. They all will "fight for me" as well, but never do they promise anything that might be controversial (unlike their opponent - they are obviously biased against their opponent and yet they are my best source of information about their opponent)
National news I will hear about and I can form opinions. However local it is much harder. The newspapers I have access to are not helping.
Plus, there's the visual cue to those around me that I'm not just idly scrolling, I'm actually looking at something.
(it was about "Tagesschau", a major news outlet by the public broadcasting system)
I don't want to deny a modern problem may exist based on additional signals, but this statistic isn't necessarily bad: News ought to be consistently exposing viewers to vocabulary they don't know.
Not just as a way to help people naturally grow their vocabulary by seeing it used in context, but also because the news should cover topics and specialties that are outside any individual's usual work and leisure.
I will agree that the Attention Economy has replaced most of the traditional "news" with angry click-bait.
It was the most boring and soul-crushing class I've ever taken in my life. After that remote learning course about Quality Assurance in college, of course.
Not saying there are not great news content in other languages. However English should be expected to dominate over the whole world.
Obviously the best coverage will be in the country's majority language.
We're either propagandized by reading the news or watching it on TV OR we're holed up in a confirmation biased world by social media (which is also propagandized).
The Guardian, AP, Reuters, NPR, etc. Hell, the New York Review of Books is crazy good, although their world news coverage usually is slipped into book reviews.
His time was a nice success for the newspaper and a sad addition to the average stupidity of the world.
They taught the teenagers how to question and interrogate the claims presented in the newspapers, which is far more effective than blindly branding 'MSM newspapers' as propaganda. (The study was conducted in France; are you sure that conventional French newspapers are propaganda of any inclination?)
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Fixed it for you.