Seems like a paper from a young student who needs to get his 3000 wordcount.
It just bloats the article and makes it difficult to get the information out of it.
I think it's great, it shows there's always a human side to trends and large statistics.
Some of the worst offenders are magazine writers. I've read articles that go on and on and yet say nothing.
Interested to know why you're not interested in the human angle.
Call me inhumane, but a single story doesn't mean anything. It's just some random point in the set. Drawing any conclusions from such a single point is dangerous (the larger the set, the more), as we humans just love to extrapolate single points and even tend have quite strong emotional defenses about their importance.
To remove the emotional part, just think of something from IT, like response times or test coverages. See, a story of an obscenely long API response (out of thousands) doesn't make much sense anymore. Debugging individual cases may even lead you on a completely wrong track. Unless you want to merely resolve that particular single request.
I'm sorry about the tone. Stories about others make humans relate (which is good), but they also have such undesirable effects (hype over facts, extrapolating, etc).
1. Trump’s Travel Ban, Aimed at Terrorists, Has Blocked Doctors - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/health/trump-travel-ban-d...
2. Trump’s Immigration Order Could Make It Harder To Find A Psychiatrist Or Pediatrician - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-immigration-orde...
Both of these are reports on exactly the same issue, but different techniques.
The NYTimes prefers to use pictures of a doctor, along with quotes from various doctors and medical students. "We need him desperately", says someone about an oncologist. "I love this country", says a Syrian doctor about America.
Fivethirtyeight tells the story with statistics. How many doctors are there in America? How many of those are immigrants? How many from these countries? All told in one image. Which specialties do these doctors practice? In which counties do they practice in? No human interest, just the facts.
Me personally, I prefer FiveThirtyEight's style. I read their article and that one image helped me realise what a grave issue it was. They get straight to the point, no fluff. But I totally understand how others might connect more with the NYTimes article. Seeing the story from the perspective of a real, breathing human. Hearing them talk about love, about sacrifice, about family. It humanises the issue and they understand it better. Different strokes.
It's like saying the average net worth of Jeff Bezos and 99 homeless people is 1 billion USD, etc etc
Averages and generalizations only tell a portion of the story. Anecdotes can shed light on "noise".
That's also a single aggregated number. Until the data doesn't cover those millions dire situation, it's a bad data. Emotionless analogy: like a green status page when some percentile of requests is failing.
See, you've mentioned "millions" rather than some "that person.". That's exactly what I mean.
This incentivizes increasing employment percentage. An easy way to do that is by decreasing the value of a job. Suddenly it doesn't ensure you can build a living, own a home, support a family anymore. But it is still used as a primary measure of the wellbeing of the economy.
This is why you need individual stories to interrogate the quality of your data. Afterwards, you obviously need to come up with new measures that more accurately reflect how well the economy is working for the people in it. But the interrogation will have to work on the basis of anecdotes.
Repeated enough, it can create a narrative that the wider groups don't matter as long as you support the few exceptionals. This seems to play out across all sides of US society both in justice (think "headline" prosecution of corrupt individuals in finance etc) and in social welfare. This is not to say that exceptional individuals do not have a disproportionate role in society. They unquestionably do. However I can't think of any of those individuals who has not been enabled by dozens if not thousands of talented others.
I guess I'll contradict myself with the anecdote (I recognize this is totally not representative). I've heard a lot of stories about how "they do this and that, somewhere" based on a news about some single case. Some make sense, but also lots of variants of vaccines and autism stories (mostly, regarding modern politics, so I don't want to describe anything in particular).
Most humans remember personal narratives far more efficiently than they parse data tables. Humans who don't operate like this are very much an exception.
So this is a communication technique - part of rhetoric, in fact. And communicating with median readers is what journalists are paid to do.
Feature stories have typically attempted to hook the reader not through a news lead, but though a colour intro - and one technique is to introduce an abstract issue by relating it through a case-study. You may not like them, but when done well they can work.
Being done well, however means that the case study should be fairly short and there shouldn't be a mismatch between headline promising one thing and annoying the reader when the opening paragraphs don't deliver.
In traditional print, the combination of headline, subhead and design combined gives you an idea of the type of article you are about to read. However when the headline is simply posted as a link, it can feel like bait-and-switch. You go in expecting a pithy summary of the issues, you get a feature article.
This is a side effect of the way the story is posted, rather than a particular problem with the journalism, in my opinion, though I do think the initial anecdotage is a bit leisurely and meandering in this case, for my taste.
Journalist aren't just paid to communicate with median readers, but with all readers. If close to all articles have the same format some readers will be put off by that.
I'm not arguing for removing all personal stories. Just for more of a balance.
(Now we could have a debate on the meaning of 'starving', but let's just say there is a broad area between skipping a few meals and dying from lack of food that is all covered by how people use the word.)