| Well, I do think that I suffer from a bit of British-envy...years of Monty Python/Peep Show/Ricky Gervais/Malcolm Tucker have conditioned me to think that the British are the superior culture when it comes to wit. I honestly can't think of many times when a UK headline has annoyed me in the way the Wapo does. Probably the worst offender is the Daily Mail, but they're merely artless in how they try to cram the entire article into a headline. Sample from today: "Moment of revenge: Husband is caught on surveillance footage brutally beating his wife's would-be rapist to death with a tire iron as he tried to flee NY apartment while still pulling up his pants" But the Wapo goes beyond artless, and right into the mindset of "our readers must be fucking dumb to not be clicking on our stories in droves. Let's explain to them why they should be clicking on our stories!" - "Trump announced his gifts to veterans. Here’s what we learned." - "Cancer deaths rose during the recession. But why?" - "The world is about to install 700 million air conditioners. Here’s what that means for the climate" - "This might be the darkest theory yet about why Donald Trump keeps winning" The one advantage of newspaper print is that, compared to webserver space, it's very finite, which means that if a story was worthy enough to have hundreds of barrels of ink tapped to make it physical, then it was a story implicitly worth the reader's time. I guess now that you can just slap anything onto a website that headlines need to be written ("X and Y happened yesterday. Here's why it's important") as if readers now automatically assume that all webstories are without value, and thus need to be constantly reminded that some stories are worth clicking through. |