The News Readability Problem

The low readability of news has often been attributed to production and format features, such as deadline pressures and news story organizational features. This study, however, puts the blame elsewhere. News stories written by nine high-profile journalists and later revealed as deceptive were more readable and contained more direct quotations (another readability indicator) than authentic stories generated by the same news organizations. Because the stories were written under similar production and format conditions, these findings indicate that low readability is due to the challenge of journalism to convey information only about the real world. Not so constrained, deceptive “news” portrays a simpler world.