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I just wish people would take the time to read articles more. Literacy rates in the US have been dropping. 20% of Americans are illiterate and half Americans read below a 6th grade level. I just wish people wanted to engage with reading more. I get that long form reading on a phone is not ideal. Even with short articles people don't seem to want to spend 5 minutes reading. Every time I see a tldr it underscores that people's attention spans seem to be consistently shrinking.
I agree but I don't think bad journalism practices are the way to fix that. If something, they will drive readers further away eventually.
Where's the bad journalism in this case? Yvan Pailler, the professor quoted in the article, called it a treasure map & the title clearly shows that 'treasure map' isn't meant to be taken literally.
In my opinion (and others' in this thread) the headline is misleading even with the quotes and the tldr was welcome. That's all. I don't think there's a lot much more to discuss without getting attached to what at the end of the day is just a post in an aggregator.
While that's certainly part if it, you're also seeing the result of headlines being used for clickbait. Tl;dr used to be just called a journalistic headline, but now they're less likely to follow the same standards.
It used to be the case that for most journalism you could get the necessary information from the headline or the headline and first sentence. As you can imagine, given modern website advertising metrics, this would now be quite unprofitable.
If all the necessary information is in the headline and first few lines then that's a bad article, in my opinion. That should be the crux of the article but the rest should provide context, which is incredibly important to understand almost any important topic.
Yes, that's how the structure of journalistic writing used to be. Necessary information and main takeaway followed by additional context.
Now you get a clickbait headline followed by a paragraph and a half getting to the main point, but just before it does, the paywall, subscription box, or whatever appears. Because of that, occasionally people will provide the main idea/point (tl;dr), and people then decide whether they'd like to read it or not.
Your concern, I think, which I happen to agree with, is that people less and less bother to then read the article to gain better understanding or context. But it's worth realizing that in a time when people read a lot more, headlines actually served roughly the same purpose as a tl;dr does.
There isn't a paywall in this article
The general atmosphere and habit of the reader is to assume there will be, and that the title is inflated, etc. None of this has anything to do with you or the article posted in particular, but is now the culture of news reading for readers to try to add additional context, in the form of comments, and some of those comments will be attempts by readers to help one another navigate the sea of articles while looking for factual information presented well.
Well put.
I wish people would read more too. I was an avid reader in my youth and my younger sibling has trouble reading well below where I was at that age and it saddens me. I included this because people are stupid and may get upset if they read this and find out it’s not actually leading to piles of gold
I don't think everything should be modified just because of what "stupid people" might think of it.
The headlines need to be more truthful. It's not the stupid people that read a headline, and then are disappointed in the actual story that doesn't match what the headline said.
If the head line reads "Aliens land in America!" And then it turned out to be about immigrants from Europe I'd be pretty upset even though the headline is technically true, everyone reading it is going to assume a totally different thing.