Journalism Has Gone Down the Tubes

[CoronaBorealis]

This kind of journalism drives me insane. Read the headline, then the by-line, then the first two actual paragraphs of the story. Is this the type of stuff AI puts out, or are journalism schools really teaching people to repeat the same information 4 times in a row?

It reminds me of school papers where students would repeat information just to fill space. “Jack was a dog. He was a big dog. Jack was a big dog.”

 

[sherrick13]

Welcome to 1977. I remember at 9 yrs old noticing how crappy the media was.

It was in how they were covering the Panama Canal handover treaty.

 

[donner]

looks like a tv station cut and pasted the lead and second paragraph and used them as the headline and deck for the website.

Hard to say from what you posted if the article was written by the tv station or if it was pulled from another source (AP article, local newspaper, etc).

But generally, it's what you get when you ask camera pointers to write articles.

 

[XYZ]

TV media is a bunch of drama queen morons.
Print media is about broke and dead.

Freedom of the press has died.
Just idiot manipulation now.

 

[dennishoddy]

As I remember from a journalism class, every thing in the entire article should be summarized in the first paragraph with detailed information in the body.
As admin on another website, we are seeing AI posts from spammers more and more. It’s really easy to spot them and send to the internet graveyard. All the hoopla about AI is lacking one thing. Human expression and grammatical errors when posting.

 

[TwoForFlinching]

Internet journalism isn't clear and concise by design. The idea is to keep you scrolling the page to expose yourself to more ads. Every time you scroll 1000 pixels, cha-ching. That's why you see so many one and two sentence paragraphs, lots of reiderating, photo and video heavy articles.

Source: It's how I make a living. well, not news journalism... I do editorial puff pieces and big galleries of Oklahoma history and oddities. Scroll baby scroll.

 

[CoronaBorealis]

That's why you see so many one and two sentence paragraphs, lots of reiderating, photo and video heavy articles.

I’ve noticed the one and two sentence paragraphs before. Interesting.

 

[Snattlerake]

Internet journalism isn't clear and concise by design. The idea is to keep you scrolling the page to expose yourself to more ads. Every time you scroll 1000 pixels, cha-ching. That's why you see so many one and two sentence paragraphs, lots of reiderating, photo and video heavy articles.

Source: It's how I make a living. well, not news journalism... I do editorial puff pieces and big galleries of Oklahoma history and oddities. Scroll baby scroll.

And before you even get to the meat of the article, they have to give you their complete life's story along with their parents and the neighbors and the time of day it was when they were born and the schools they went to and on and on. Then at the end of the article it was absolutely nothing that was in the title.

 

[SoonerP226]

The headlines are normally not written by the author of the article unless you're looking at content from a really small operation. It usually comes from an editor, and is designed to hook you into reading the article.

If the tech journalists that I read/watch/listen to are any indication, the article's author is probably as cheesed about the headline as you are. I was listening to a podcast this week where one of the hosts (an engineer and programmer who used to write a column in one of the big tech trade press magazines) was talking about one of the headlines an editor slapped on his column. He said it had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the article, but the editor had written it to draw in readers. And he hasn't written that column in decades...

 

[TerryMiller]

Even before the current "click-away" mindset with writing news articles, many a time I noticed that once one got into the article itself, it contradicted the point of the headline. It might be 6 or 7 paragraphs down in the story, but it always amazed me how messed up the stories were.