This is called storytelling. It is one of the great gifts of being alive and human that we are able to create or enjoy a well told story.
While it’s not appropriate for every subject, or every hour of ones day, it is really a lovely thing and we should cherish those who expend the effort to create long and detailed narrative works.
If you’re not in the mood for a story of this kind and just want to know what happened, the headline is a pretty accurate summary.
No, it's not just "storytelling", and your answer is pretentious in the extreme, painting an aesthetic preference as some fundamental appreciation for human life, and the opposite by implication as crass.
Storytelling is about narrative. It's about conveying a sequence of ideas in such a way as to make an impression. One can achieve storytelling without an abundance of irrelevant details ("Sometimes a travelling circus unfolds itself on the hard-packed sand of the heath’s carpark" does nothing to further establish our sense of setting, nor to characterize anything at all) and just being over-dramatic (leading with an inset quote about little at all, but making sure to lead with the title 'Counter-Terrorism Command').
Just because it's storytelling doesn't mean it's /good/ storytelling. The whole thing stays just one shade shy of purple. That is annoying as hell for a lot of people, and not at all "a great gift of being alive" that is "a really lovely thing." On the contrary: that's something a lot of even-literary editors would take a hacksaw to.
Couldn’t agree more. Know someone in the art history field, and all their academic texts are insufferable. People aren’t trying to deliver a point in the simplest way possible, instead they engage in some sort of linguistic masturbation. Obscure words, lengthy sentences, intricate syntactic constructions, etc. I assume this is some sort of a signalling method: “You can barely understand what I am taking about, and you don’t know half of the words, so I must be smart and this text must be important.”
I think the main problem is not that it's told like a story, it's that it's told badly. The non-linear structure is incredibly confusing, you can absolutely tell the story chronologically and keep it interesting, but it's sort of in fashion to meander about the timeline without reason. I've found these types of stories much more engaging by simply skipping whole paragraphs that diverge from the main thread.
> it's sort of in fashion to meander about the timeline without reason
There is a reason. A modern paper wants articles that are long, with the meat of the matter spread out thoroughly throughout, because this maximizes the amount of ads you can fit in between paragraphs, and maximizes the chances a reader will view them.
In general: if you're wondering why some aspect of journalism is rotten, it's most likely because it needs to accommodate advertising.
Has it occurred to you that the reader might like something that is long, because they see reading content of this type as primarily a form of entertainment?
It's not like there's a prize at the end, or some secret promo code hidden within the words. It's created for the purpose of idle consumption.
While it’s not appropriate for every subject, or every hour of ones day, it is really a lovely thing and we should cherish those who expend the effort to create long and detailed narrative works.
If you’re not in the mood for a story of this kind and just want to know what happened, the headline is a pretty accurate summary.