History
Welcome to History!
This community is dedicated to sharing and discussing fascinating historical facts from all periods and regions.
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NOTE WELL: Personal attacks and insults will not be tolerated. Stick to talking about the historical topic at hand in your comments. Insults and personal attacks will get you an immediate ban for a period of time determined by the moderator who bans you.
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Post about history. Ask a question about the past, share a link to an article about something historical, or talk about something related to history that interests you. Please encourage discussion whenever possible.
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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.