It’s funny editing. They could’ve easily written something like “The $130 million donation is about $100 for each of the 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military, but it is unclear exactly how the money will be distributed.”
I get the feeling that a lot of current articles basically get no editing. Maybe they pass it onto some AI tool or something, but actual real editing work is barely getting performed.
(weirdly, I feel like this extends to a lot of stuff beyond journalism - movies are all getting to be 2½-3 hours long, we just don’t seem to get nice tightly-paced 90-min action movies or thrillers anymore; AAA games are of course leaning towards being big open worlds with lots of side activities and RPG elements to occupy your time for dozens if not hundreds of hours, with the occasional 4-5 hour perfunctory single-player campaign in games that are really supposed to be played for the multiplayer, which again is expected to last you for like a year until the next franchise entry; books are all getting to be fucking massive - a factoid that always surprises me is that the whole of Lord of the Rings is just like 1.1k pages (and a bunch of that is the Appendices), which is the length of individual Brandon Sanderson books, in a series of 5 that’s still supposed to have 5 more in the future! and of course there’s been a rise in self-distributed online novels that go on for thousands of chapters, and online streaming which is by definition completely unedited content… no-one wants to edit anymore!)
It sure seems like the news editorial desk is dead, but genre fiction has had this issue since forever - Dickens for example made most of his income from serial fiction and it paid to be expansive. Fantasy fiction seems to have had the phenomenon of authors starting out writing a decently tight first book only to publish a series of ever-expanding doorstoppers for a while, at least since the 80’s. Maybe successful authors have bigger egos and/or more leverage and that results in less of a tendency to self-edit or accept editorial advice.
I doubt they’re distributing it evenly.
you know 3/4 of this is gonna end up in the increasingly inflated costs of the ballroom project
It’s funny editing. They could’ve easily written something like “The $130 million donation is about $100 for each of the 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military, but it is unclear exactly how the money will be distributed.”
I get the feeling that a lot of current articles basically get no editing. Maybe they pass it onto some AI tool or something, but actual real editing work is barely getting performed.
(weirdly, I feel like this extends to a lot of stuff beyond journalism - movies are all getting to be 2½-3 hours long, we just don’t seem to get nice tightly-paced 90-min action movies or thrillers anymore; AAA games are of course leaning towards being big open worlds with lots of side activities and RPG elements to occupy your time for dozens if not hundreds of hours, with the occasional 4-5 hour perfunctory single-player campaign in games that are really supposed to be played for the multiplayer, which again is expected to last you for like a year until the next franchise entry; books are all getting to be fucking massive - a factoid that always surprises me is that the whole of Lord of the Rings is just like 1.1k pages (and a bunch of that is the Appendices), which is the length of individual Brandon Sanderson books, in a series of 5 that’s still supposed to have 5 more in the future! and of course there’s been a rise in self-distributed online novels that go on for thousands of chapters, and online streaming which is by definition completely unedited content… no-one wants to edit anymore!)
It sure seems like the news editorial desk is dead, but genre fiction has had this issue since forever - Dickens for example made most of his income from serial fiction and it paid to be expansive. Fantasy fiction seems to have had the phenomenon of authors starting out writing a decently tight first book only to publish a series of ever-expanding doorstoppers for a while, at least since the 80’s. Maybe successful authors have bigger egos and/or more leverage and that results in less of a tendency to self-edit or accept editorial advice.