> "The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade"
I find titles promising a specific piece of useful information combined with longform, author storyline based content to be one of the most fustrating things about reading traditional journalism on the internet. A form of bait and switch.
Journalism students spend so much of their time doing pointless writing exercises, they feel like they should continue with it, as if their reputation depends on it.
In the modern world the opposite is true - attention spans are short, you must get to the point.
A similar thing is true in video - I can't stand vloggers who dance around or have to explain the whole history of the subject before getting to the point.
I blame Google - they incentivise long articles with lots of keywords and longer videos.
For example: this article has been voted to the front page of HN, which is more than thousands of terse, AP-style inverted-pyramid news articles can say.
No proper headings.
To hell with that. I won't ever know what they're on about.
I used to cover-to-cover it pretty regularly, and these long form articles/headline combinations are great in that situation.
Sure, it's not great for the internet. But I don't think it's a feature of "internet journalism"
> A form of bait and switch.
What do you expect? A terse jargon-filled exposition of the algorithm fit for graduate students?
It's perfectly fine to not appreciate the style of the author, but to call it "bait and switch" is a bit much.
I've completely stopped reading past the first sentence of articles that begin like this, which is a lot of articles recently. If I wanted to know what people ate for breakfast, I'd use facebook!