“It pains me to say this, but we’re going to have to change our writing style. There’s a type of sentence that’s dead,” says Kahn.

In other words, long, syntactically complex sentences are now outdated. Sentences will have to be shorter, in light of a simple (perhaps saddening) reality: “many people who are less than 40 years old don’t have the references that existed in the past.” This may have some truth to it, however one could argue readers have replaced text-based references with other examples.

Journalist usually get angry when they are told to make their content more 'accessible', but one must adapt to realities instead of perceiving them as they should be, says Kahn.

Kahn advises that, given the “mise-en-scène” society in which we live in, journalists should add some drama or action to draw readers in.

He also contends, more controversially, that “we can’t have journalists specialized in a single section for five or ten years anymore.” More precisely, Kahn acknowledges that some journalistic beats require extended expertise, but that those journalists should regularly be assigned to entirely different stories.

If they don’t do so, their articles will single-dimensioned, instead of putting a story in relation to other aspects of social life…

Any thoughts?

Source: Le Monde (link to summary of article)