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Strangely Engraved Rock Is Giant 'Treasure Map', Archaeologists Say (www.sciencealert.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/history@lemmy.world
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A piece of rock with mysterious markings that lay largely unstudied for 4,000 years is now being hailed as a "treasure map" for archaeologists, who are using it to hunt for ancient sites around north-western France.

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[–] 2 points 3 years ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    There isn't a paywall in this article

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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