Northern lights journalism
April 16, 2025 at 10:39 AM by Dr. Drang
I read a story on Apple News this morning, Northern lights may be viewable in some US states this week: Where and when to see it, and I want to complain about it. Unlike my previous two posts, this will be short.
The article is from USA Today, and you can read it on their site in your browser, which you may prefer, as that gives you the opportunity to skip the ads via Reader Mode. But my complaint isn’t about ads in Apple News, it’s about the article itself.
You might think from the article’s title that its main topic is where you’ll be able to see tonight’s northern lights. And it does get to that, but only after 400 words in a 600-word article, a frustrating inversion of the inverted pyramid. The 400 words of throat clearing explains what the northern lights are, what causes them, that they’re also called the aurora borealis, that there’s a similar phenomenon in the southern hemisphere called the aurora australis, and how NASA uses satellites to predict aurorae. These are all useful bits of information to people who don’t already know them, but they don’t belong before the list of states where you have a decent chance of seeing the northern lights.
(In some ways, of course, this is a complaint about ads. The inverted inverted pyramid structure is there to force you to scroll through the ads that Apple and USA Today want you to see.)
BBEdit says I’m now about 250 words into this post, so let me give you the list of states:
- North Dakota
- Montana
- Minnesota
- Washington
- Michigan
- Wisconsin
- Maine
- Oregon
- Idaho
- Wyoming
- Iowa
- New York
- Nebraska
- Illinois
- Vermont
- New Hampshire
- Pensylvania
That’s the same order as in the article, and if you can figure out the rationale behind it, you’re doing better than I am. I thought at first that it put the northernmost states first, but that doesn’t explain Vermont and New Hampshire coming after Illinois. And you may be wondering how someone could lead off with North Dakota and include Nebraska but somehow omit South Dakota. 🤷
By the way, the article was written yesterday afternoon. As of 10:30 this morning (CDT), the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center says the likelihood of seeing northern lights in the southernmost of these states isn’t very good.
If you’re like me, the red-on-black text at the bottom of the image is hard to read. It says
View Line Indicates The Southern Extent of Where Aurora Might Be Seen on the Northern Horizon
So the southern extent is now just north of the Illinois/Wisconsin border. I’ll probably go out tonight to take a quick look anyway.