I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front, instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?
What do you like in this format? I genuinely don't understand how it can sell, but if it does, there must be something?
Plus, like a stick of gum, sometimes you just have nothing to do and it fills the time.
[0] http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diam...
It's an intentional lie because "How the MH370 Search is Going" or whatever won't get clicks.
In the old days, they'd buy your paper if they could scan all the stories and get information easily. Now, the reader is only looking at one story referred by a search engine or blogpost or link farm.
Once I discover it's in fact a long-form article, I will space bar-skim to see if there is any merit, and stop reading in 99% of cases.
At least clickbait spam content has the class to let you off the hook after 5 seconds.
You click on an article about MH370 or the Paris attacks or something, and the fourth paragraph is "Jean-Denis lives in a quiet suburb of Orlean with his two children and their dog, a basset hound golden retriever mix named Harmonie." Good god! It's the slow, lingering death by a thousand cuts.
"But Jean-Denis didn't always live a comfortable life in the suburbs. The first seven years of his life he grew up with his grandparents in Transylvania. The potato crop wasn't always good, and the long winters taught him about patience. A trait he's been needing in the search for the MH370."
Actually, one question I used to like to ask people: "In bookshops, what qualifies a book to move from 'fiction' to 'literature'?" (yes, you can get poetry and whatnot in the literature section, but it's primarily fiction-based)
literature ⊃ literary fiction
This is exactly what I've wanted but never known how to express it ... is there such a thing? I would love to browse a list of news stories distilled to factual bullet points. Sigh. One can dream :)
4 billion years = 208 billion weeks, right?
I consider it to be interesting information. And the author has chosen to tell you an interesting story instead of just a fact fact.
If the goal was to show you something that would satiate the need to be interested then I think the story does a much better job.
When someone says they'll do one thing but do something else, that's lying.