We live in a short-attention-span age. I have a huge array of feeds spewing information at me like the proverbial firehose, so I often don’t do more than look at the headline and RSS excerpt, and I don’t think I’m alone.<\/p>\n
Given that, it’s more important than ever that the headlines given to articles actually, you know, match the contents<\/strong>. For example, when I see a story in the New York Times<\/cite> headlined Environmental Agency Tightens Smog Standards<\/a>, I would like this to accurately reflect the contents of the story. When the first sentence of the story is:<\/p>\n The Environmental Protection Agency announced a modest tightening of the smog standard on Wednesday evening, overruling the unanimous advice of its scientific advisory council for a more protective standard.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I feel like I’ve been misled by the people writing the headlines. The headline is factually accurate, but nearly the opposite of the actual story in terms of connotation. “Environmental Agency Tightens Smog Standards” makes me think “Yay, progress!” while the story is yet another in a long litany of stories about political hacks ignoring or overriding scientific expertise.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of course, I knew to click through to the full story because I have a brain that evolved over millions of years to give me the capacity to recognize patterns, and the EPA willingly tightening environmental standards of any type doesn’t fit the established pattern. I figured they must’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the decision, so I clicked through to see who had held a gun to their head.<\/p>\n Actually, I guess that may mean this is a deliberate decision… Sort of like slapping “Anna Kournikova Nude” in the Subject: line of an email with a virus attached– by throwing a surprising headline on a depressingly typical story, they increase pageviews, and thus ad revenue.<\/p>\n Still, you might hope that the Paper of Record would hold to a slightly higher standard than hacker kiddies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We live in a short-attention-span age. I have a huge array of feeds spewing information at me like the proverbial firehose, so I often don’t do more than look at the headline and RSS excerpt, and I don’t think I’m alone. Given that, it’s more important than ever that the headlines given to articles actually,… Continue reading Headline Mismatch<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n