Maybe you don't know this, but the "A-hed" article of the WSJ is the humorous, light-hearted take on some cultural phenomenon that appears every couple of days. It's got a distinct separation (graphically) from the rest of the news, and is written not to be taken too seriously. (It's not so apparent in the online version, if you haven't read it before).

So you don't have to worry that it's some broad decline in journalistic standards (at least based on this)... The WSJ is one of the few quite reputable news rooms out there.

You can read about A-hed articles here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303362404575580...

And there was even a book published a few years ago with collections of these kinds of amusing stories: https://www.amazon.com/Floating-Off-Page-Stories-Journals/dp...

> It's not so apparent in the online version, if you haven't read it before.

I think this is the core issue that leads to sentiment like OPs. Real news still exists, but it's the highly editorialized and opinionated articles that are shared more widely. News agencies universally are terrible at obviously differentiating the two to users.

99% of people when they open an article scroll directly to the content. But any discerning features (in this case, a small font A-hed link) are tucked way at the top. In this case, the A-hed link takes you to the A-hed home page but still does not offer any context to what A-hed is.

> So you don't have to worry that it's some broad decline in journalistic standards (at least based on this).

As long as the WSJ does such a bad job at separating "WSJ the proper news room" and "A-hed the not proper news room", their brand will suffer. OP is proof of that, and I think it's safe to assume the average HN reader is more astute than the average citizen. A tiny link to nowhere useful is not enough of a UI change for us to blame the user. The onus is on the news agencies to do a better job giving context for articles.

Is it the news agency's fault, or the reader's fault? In this case, it really isn't clear that it's not "real news". But I see plenty of people on social media sharing articles from news sites where they're clearly marked as an editorial or opinion piece, and believing or treating them as if they were exactly the same as a news article that attempts to paint a neutral picture of the facts.

Do newspapers need to put an explanation of what an opinion piece is at the top of every opinion piece?

Perhaps newspapers should stop running opinions and editorials altogether, or move them to an entirely different brand.

I don't really think that's the answer. Actual physical newspapers ran editorials / opinions for decades without a problem. I think the solution is better UI/UX.

A separate brand would be a better UX.

It's clear that internet distribution is very different from physical newspapers and people don't pay much attention to the domain and styling.

IMO, it is the news agency's responsibility to make it absolutely clear to the user what they are reading. If a majority of people come away with the wrong understanding after visiting a website, that is the website's fault. It's a clear UX problem.

Old paper newspapers accomplished this by physically having a separate section for opinion pieces. It's a harder problem when people share direct links to an article.

That said, news agencies don't try very hard. I think it's easy to argue they intentionally make it hard to differentiate. If WSJ really cared about making it clear to the user what this article was, they would have done more than hiding the word "A-hed" in a small font in the top corner.

Amen. Learning how to read the news is a skill just like everything else. The direct links of the internet make it harder, but one still needs to try and understand the context of the publication and how the article is presented. A-heads are entertainment.

This is the "You are holding it wrong" opinion I guess.

If A-heads are entertainment then why does it say A-head and not Entertainment? I am not at fault here if I don't know what the hell A-head is supposed to mean and just think that this news site is kinda garbage.

What exactly about the presentation of this article was I supposed to pick up on and see that it is entertainment. It is the exact same presentation than their "U.S. Seeks to Seize Iranian Fuel Bound for Venezuela" article. Is that one news or is it also entertainment?

This is a very literal approach. I assume that when you watch network TV you assume everything is coming at you with the same purpose and intent (news, talking head show, some documentary like 60 minutes.) Just because you want everything you read online to be "hard news" doesn't mean it will be. It takes a bit of work to understand the context of what you are seeing. So yes, you are holding it wrong.

What are you talking about? NO, I do not assume everything on the TV has the same intent. I never said anything even remotely close to that. I do however assume that if I am watching the news that I get the news.

I also don't want to be everything online to be "hard news", but when I go to a newspaper site I expect it to be news if it isn't otherwise noted. No the cryptic "A-Head" does not count. I am not a news insider and I think it is completely inappropriate to demand from the consumer to learn such cryptic jargon.

You said this:

> one still needs to try and understand the context of the publication and how the article is presented.

The context of the publication is that it is an article on the Wall Street Journal which is a business focused Newspaper and the Presentation of the article is exactly the same as the rest.

How is it my error then that I think an article like this is just garbage. (Hint: If your customers think your product is garbage then you need to do something about it and not just say "You are holding it wrong".)

> The WSJ is one of the few quite reputable news rooms out there.

The WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch. The credibility of their newsroom begins being compromised by his owning it. He will destroy its credibility utterly by selling it for politicial influence in news reporting. Just as he has everywhere he has bought media. The particular example of compromised credibility that comes to mind is the Times of London which is now Murdoch propaganda (all be it vastly more polite than fox news) where it used to do credible news reporting. Times reporting now can still be excellent but has a "be cautious" flag on it that it used not to have in the days prior to Mudoch. The man has become vastly worse in the past couple of decades as has everything he touches.

Murdoch bought the WSJ in 2007. When is he going to start destroying its credibility "utterly"?

Uh have you read their commentary/opinions? Half the time they come off as if they're trolling.

I'm sure at one point they were a thinking man's newspaper. At this point they're just fan service for people who have drunk the koolaid but can't stomach Fox's mass market approach.

To be fair the WSJ has always had some pretty outlandish opinion pieces. The tradition was that these were separate to the news reporting and the news reporting was untouched by them. But now it's in Murdoch stable. Sad.

He started in 2007. The date when you consider it utterly destroyed is up to the reader.

I feel like he hasn't taken any actions to compromise the credibility of the Journal. Remember their Theranos coverage? Wikipedia writes: "Elizabeth Holmes asked Rupert Murdoch —- who at the time was a major investor in Theranos and owner of the Journal — to "personally kill" an investigative piece being written about Theranos. Murdoch refused, instead stating that he "had confidence in editors to handle the truth - whatever it may be". Murdoch went on to lose approximately $100 million in his investments in Theranos."

The opinion columns slant very far right, and I'm sure Murdoch has played some role in that. I subscribe to the Journal and am outraged every time I see them. But, it's good to see what other people are talking about. It does you no harm to read an opinion column that you vehemently disagree with. I'm sure people feel the same way about opinion columns in The New York Times, which I also read and tend to agree with.

My TL;DR here is that if you are interested in the news, you should get it from a variety of reputable sources. The Journal has proved over the years that it is reputable. I haven't seen anything recently that would change my mind. I have friends that get all their news through social media and they are constantly outraged based on pure misinformation. If they read the Journal, they'd have a much better understanding of the facts. (Same goes for the New York Times, or Washington Post, or The Guardian.)

All of the links to the A-hed section in the WSJ article link to a 404. Is there an updated link?

https://www.wsj.com/news/types/a-hed works for me right now, as do all of these:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/baseball-stadiums-major-league-... "Baseball Stadiums Are Closed to Fans—but This Guy’s Balcony Is Open for Business"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-ponder-how-to-throw-a... "Americans Ponder How to Throw a Party"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-doctors-treating-coronav... "How Do Doctors Treating Coronavirus Relax? By Playing the Game ‘Pandemic’"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-scientist-turned-the-coronavi... "A Scientist Turned the Coronavirus Into Music—Here’s What It Sounds Like"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-15-lockdowns-are-lift... "The Covid 15: Lockdowns Are Lifting, and Our Clothes Don’t Fit"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/oversize-sneakers-are-hot-but-v... "Oversize Sneakers Are Hot but Very Hard to Wear. ‘I Just Can’t Balance.’"

If you want the "pure" news as in 1921, subscribe directly to AP/AFP/Reuters/EFE. The world has changed, and most of the added value of newspapers now comes from contextualization that you seem to disregard to having no value, despite being the higher journalistic effort.

It's easy to report that a chicken died crossing the road, it's a lot harder to explain what chain of events led to a chicken dying crossing the road.

Are you really complaining about 15% of their front page featuring their opinion section?

Your 1921 NYT example has "Broker is Slain at Bride's Door By Her Gardener", which the Times would never feature prominently today, because it's basically yellow press.

It also features some French pilot's unverified claims about a new record – something that would see HN storm the barricades today.

There's a story there, right at the top, about a group of visitors of the Capitol being disappointed. I'm not entirely sure if it's trying to make fun of the congresswoman it mentions. But it does sound a lot more like today's opinion pieces than a straight news story.

Because pure news are pretty much free today. So newspaper need to provide something else: analysis, opinions, etc. to be able to sell something.

Not to mention we have metrics which tell us exactly what kind of reporting is most likely to have good reader engagement (and thus higher ad payouts). Most news sources are just giving us exactly what the majority of people want.

Even HN does this. It is the magic of the reply button. As a result, they pull more screen time and have a stickier crowd to show "we are hiring" ads.

I view this phenomenon as a sort of sociological entropy. Anything bad that can happen will happen if the people tolerate it. Same with shitty politicians, encroaching of rights, etc. Its all just a matter of time.

This theory doesn't hold up against the test of time.

We used to have tyrant monarchs - Genghis Khan would roam the steppe and cutting people's heads off and that would be normal every day life.

There are still bad things today, but more people have more rights and a higher quality of life.

> Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan was neither a tyrant nor a monarch, nor was cutting off heads a part of his everyday life. He actually got more Mongol people more rights and a higher quality of life.

I would request you to read a detailed and accurate account of his life by a historian.

For example, Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy by Frank McLynn https://amzn.com/B00X2ZW5ZI

Do you find the following inaccurate or biased, and if so, for the uninformed, briefly why?

"Campaigns initiated in his lifetime include those against the Qara Khitai, Khwarezmia, and the Western Xia and Jin dynasties, and raids into Medieval Georgia, the Kievan Rus', and Volga Bulgaria. These campaigns were often accompanied by large-scale massacres of the civilian populations, especially in the Khwarazmian- and Western Xia–controlled lands. Because of this brutality, which left millions dead, he is considered by many to have been a brutal ruler"

From what I've seen Ganghis Khan was brutal against non-surrendering nations, but beneficial for those who followed him. E.g. you woulsn't see him cutting his subjects heads, and his brutality was pretty much an intimidation tactic so others army would join him.

>brutal against non-surrendering nations

This is ambiguous about cities or nations that resisted and then surrendered. There seem to be a lot of references to how surrender was followed by everyone being killed or enslaved. I kind of think that's an area of contrast between their standards and today's. You can point to "civilized" countries destroying whole cities in the 20th century, but doing it after your enemy is defeated is much more frowned on.

Also, when you say "beneficial for those who followed him" it elides what it meant when they enslaved the women and children from a conquered population. I don't think they generally allowed individuals to choose whether to be among those massacred or not. And what happened next probably wasn't consistent with modern human rights standards, which again, I think goes back to the original point that started the subthread.

That's how authoritarian regimes usually work. Do everything they say and you'll be okay. The problem is a decent number of people don't want to be absolutely subservient.

>Do everything they say and you'll be okay

This is an extremely odd thing to say about authoritarians right now, although this may be my American perspective, since people have been pointing out recently how futile it can be when dealing with police in the US. Still, I kind of think it's universal - being polite to authority is utterly useless once you are a suspect, thought to be dangerous, or have something they want.

It made a lasting impression on me when I was stopped in my car as a teenager and an officer decided that I must be a drug smuggler because I was too quiet/nervous.

Edit: I guess if you interpret "everything" broadly enough, your statement is somewhat plausible, but "everything" includes many situations where an authority asks you something that is theoretically or ought to be voluntary and you have to be aware that it's not really a choice. And it's still not always true.

Oh it’s ok then

> considered by many to have been a brutal ruler

He raided these places in military campaigns; he did not rule them at the time of the raids. So he was not a brutal ruler. In fact, he was a benevolent ruler, distributing loot equally and promoting on merit rather than nepotism.

As another commentator has pointed out, the brutality was an intimidation tactic. It was very selectively applied. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708182

He also did much to bring modern human rights to his subjects. You can read about it in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist who lives in Mongolia part-time. https://amzn.com/B000FCK206

Wasn't expecting to see Khan revisionism here, but I suppose for every mass murderer there are people who like defending them.

It's unclear what you're rebutting here. My position is that on a cyclic basis, there will always be societal elements that will trend towards the negative and nefarious as long as it is tolerated. The fact that the global minimum for such things manifested themselves much more severely (as in your example) in the past does not change the fact that it still occurs today.

Suggest you read my comment above, before you let this one story make you think the decline of civilization is imminent.

Nowhere did I say I think "the decline of civilization is imminent."

Speaking with my physics hat on I have to caution against this -- I wouldn't call it entropy, and I am very happy abusing that word in a variety of other contexts. (Like at church I will call Satan entropy.)

But the reason I'd balk here is that entropy as a phenomenon happens in absence of a driving force.

(1) In the present WSJ case, this is not mere indifference on the part of readers: storytelling is deeply a part of what makes us human and readers do actively turn away from flat descriptions of events to storied accounts—the WSJ is just satisfying the demand. Like, this part of the WSJ, the A-hed is actively edited to be a bit more fluff and less hard reporting to try and rope more of these folks in, as observed in comments above.

(2) In the case of shitty politicians, at least in the US, something even more remarkable is happening. The very construction of the US's voting system has a very non-obvious fixed point (as a transformation polity → polity), so that fixed-point theorems from mathematics seem to impose their own biasing force on the candidates. Or to use more economic language, the rules of elections in the USA actively incentivize its politicians to be shitty. Well, the parties are incentivized to be spineless and the politicians are incentivized to belong to one and thus inherit the shittiness—but it's the same thing. [note]

Entropy still has a part to play when you introduce a bias voltage like this, but it is usually the exact opposite. Entropy explains why air molecules are not falling to the floor in spite of the fact that there is a clear bias force—gravity—that makes everything else fall to the floor quite swiftly and the air molecules have certainly had enough time to start hitting the ground. Similarly, entropy may be more helpful in explaining why some news is still buried inside the Wall Street Journal articles or why the US political parties are able to work together on various operations to bomb remote lands.

[note] I can discourse at length about the downfall of the Whigs but the short and fast of it is that they had a spine or agenda of core issues, chiefly economic. They brokered compromises under one Whig president about the issue-of-the-day, slavery, to try and refocus attention on their agenda items. They nominated General Scott in 1852 to represent them. The spineless political party they were against, used the opportunity to nominate a candidate who nobody really knew and who was himself a compromise, a Southerner who was personally anti-slavery, and mirrored their opponents' agenda quite thoroughly. (Something, I should note, you can only do if your opponent has a spine and you don’t.) Voter turnout in the election of 1852 was incredibly low as a result, and that Southerner won the electoral college in a landslide, despite the fact that he did not actually do any campaigning. “I don't know what he is gonna do about the issue-of-the-day but he seems to have something in common with me” actively won out against “he thinks the issue-of-the-day is a distraction from the real problems and will broker compromises on it to try and address those real problems,” which, I don’t know, maybe was a fluke. But what wasn’t a fluke was the aftermath: any landslide loss leads to self-reflection, right, but if you have a spine it is worse: the internal tensions in the Whigs over that issue-of-the-day broke the party into two chunks and suddenly the party was no more, and a similarly spineless party ultimately took its place in the great two party system of the USA. That party’s spinelessness means that it has weathered similarly disastrous losses as the one which broke the Whigs with almost no alarm and has also led to it slowly reversing its geographic constituency from North to South as the opposite has happened to its spineless opponent, which is again much more of an interesting random-walk phenomenon that one could ascribe to entropy.

Damnn So why do air molecules not hit the ground ?

So they do—they just don’t remain there, they get kicked back up.

What is at stake is that you carry a subtle contradiction in your head, assuming you got some pieces of wisdom from your physics classes but not others.

One side of this is the minimum energy principle. Like, this is common sense, you leave a basketball bouncing in your driveway and you expect it to stop somewhere, probably (if it's not a perfectly flat blacktop) downhill of wherever you started it. Heck if you've had a hoop in your driveway you probably have a reflex to run after the ball when it touches ground, otherwise it'll eventually find the road and roll very far away as it chases the downhill. That's the minimum energy principle, dynamic friction reduces kinetic energy in a system while forces tend to make potential energy into kinetic energy, so you would expect if you just leave the system alone it ends up at rest at some minimum of potential energy.

The other side of the contradiction is that we tell you that energy is conserved cannot be created or destroyed. If you are very lucky, we tell you that there is a way of phrasing the laws of physics such that energy conservation is the same as saying that the laws of physics are the same today as they are tomorrow—we call this “time translation symmetry” and did the theorem that connects continuous symmetry is to conserved quantities is Noether’s Theorem if you are looking for something to google here.

The only way to resolve the contradiction is to say that friction is actually dissipation—energy is getting more spread out among the universe but is not being destroyed. So you want to picture a big bucket of water and a thousand little glasses and we empty the bucket only by putting it into all of those glasses. And the idea is that eventually if random processes take over the moving of the water from any of these to any other of these, all of them will have the same water level. You can actually see this if you see demonstrations of the siphon effect, water will actually flow up and down a hose to equalize two water levels in two reservoirs. When energy does this, has the same average occupation in every degree of freedom of a system, we say that the system has thermalized and we can measure its absolute temperature as that energy level. Technically temperature is not uniquely defined in any other context—mostly, we find physical objects whose properties like volume or length or so vary approximately linearly with temperature in this sense, then we use them as thermometers to measure temperatures in other contexts.

Now there is an interesting result, which is that if your bucket is at the same level as the cups, in some sense your bucket never ends up empty. Like there can be a lot of cups and that water can be spread over everything and there is only a tiny film of water in the actual bucket left, but it’s not zero.

This is also a theorem, it is called the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. It says that I can't dissipate energy into some environment without feeling noise from that environment prevent me from dissipating all of my energy into it: I have to accept random fluctuations back from it. In other words, there are no one-way channels for energy.

To bring this back to your question, the basketball only comes to rest on the ground because it has so much more energy than the thermal fluctuation energy which it gets back from the ground. When it eventually settles, it turns out that it is not fully at rest but is moving imperceptibly due to these fluctuations. And those fluctuations are imperceptible because the mass of the basketball is very large, large enough that this disturbs the center of mass by a height way smaller than the size of atoms, which it turns out are way smaller than the light you can see. So like even with a microscope, visible light is too chunky to show you this on a basketball.

But repeat the calculation for how far those 25 meV of thermal energy will launch a 28-amu nitrogen molecule and you will find that the height is roughly nine kilometers [1] which is a pretty good rough estimate for the height of the Earth's atmosphere, that's about where the troposphere ends. Just to be clear, the ground doesn't kick any individual molecules that high, they collide with other air molecules way before they get anywhere near that high, but that energy and momentum does ultimately get communicated to the whole swarm of air molecules and stops the swarm collectively from falling lower than that distance on average, even though everything is one big colliding mess. The first order prediction is actually an exponential decrease in density as you go to those higher heights, and I think that 9km figure is a 1/e decay constant, but the truth gets a lot more complicated as the ultraviolet light coming into the Earth is getting preferentially scattered in the high atmosphere and contributing a second source of energy to the system.

But yeah, the air doesn't fall down to the ground because the sun is shining and keeping our planet warm, and that warmth is imperceptible in the motion of a basketball but several kilometers in terms of the height of air molecules.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=25+meV+%2F+%2828+amu+*+9.81+...

Great counterpoints!

>When did this happen? Why? Did people lose interest in actual news? Is there less actual news to report?

Social media happened.

People have been made to think that they have got what they needed from a news article from just the title, image, summary as the next shiny news article was just waiting below to scroll.

News media are under tremendous pressure to entertain the few who actually clicked the article and is reading it.

World over only those news media which started out as traditional newspaper have some journalism integrity left and are serving news as it is. They are paying for that by going bankrupt, getting sued, journalists getting murdered etc.

More over people are getting news only from those sources which gives the news 'they like', rather than going to source which reports factual news.

When has journalism ever stuck to facts? When has the “news” been more than short stories and opinion?

Hint: Never

Read: A History of News by Mitchell Stephens https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1854941W/A_history_of_news

Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalism

> When did this happen? Why? Did people lose interest in actual news? Is there less actual news to report?

1. Search engines prioritized longer content.

2. People are less aware of longer-lasting events and most people land on news stories from social media as a one-off. The additional context is needed.

In 1999 the "Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism" [0] was instituted with an endowment from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Who is "Eric Breindel" ... well Wikipedia includes this, as his legacy:

"In 1988, Spy magazine ran a feature that depicted Breindel as a ruthlessly career-driven opportunist whose career was effectively ended by his drug bust"

And regardless of accuracy, I consider this to be an excellent definition for whatever "Opinion Journalism" must be.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Breindel_Award_for_Excell...

> When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion?

As radio and then TV (both of which favor emotion over information) displaced print as the major avenues for “news”, shaping expectations even of print media.

I'm sure that it predates Fox News Channel by a lot, after all, news business are business first and news second, but it would be misguided to ignore the fact that FNC has completely dominated viewership numbers in the US almost since its inception by doing exactly what you're complaining about. Opinion is a format that engages large numbers of people and therefore makes money extremely well.

> FNC has completely dominated viewership numbers in the US almost since its inception by doing exactly what you're complaining about.

To be fair, they mostly dominate viewership numbers by being the only right-leaning news network available, so they get half the viewing public to themselves while their competitors fight over the other half.

Sort of an indictment of the efficient market hypothesis that nobody has figured that out and gone into competition with them.

No to take away from your point, which I think is valid, but the NYT in 1921 is _the_ Internet. We’ve gone from being starved for information to being overloaded. So really you’re comparing apples to oranges they just happen to be named the same thing.

We rehash this every time a NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. submission gets popular.

It’s off-topic.

Opinion masquerading as news sells, see Fox News, MSNBC, et al.

This is an example of what’s called literary journalism. Some people (including myself) consider this a high art form. If you want to study up on the classics, read Joan Didion and John McPhee - and Tom Wolfe, the titan of creative nonfiction.

There is no crime in making a creative story that people enjoy reading out of a true event.