[joesmo]

For news articles and business correspondence (memos, emails, letters), if I don't know what the article is about and the general conclusion of the article after reading paragraph one, the writer has failed horribly.

There's few things I hate more than 'news' articles not being written properly, something that's incredibly common these days on the Internet. I especially hate articles that start out with a couple of paragraphs of some stupid, boring, anecdotal story before even hinting at what they're about. Such things are evidence of terrible writing. I don't expect blog posts to adhere to this, but I see it so often on 'news' sites, it's horribly disgusting. Yes, there is a place for magazine stories but the news is hardly ever it. And certainly, business correspondence is the last place for that kind of literal gibberish.