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by catchnear4321 1026 days ago
the owner is gannett.

the butchered coverage was in local newspapers, also owned by gannett.

which begs the question, why doesn’t the headline just, you know, name gannett?

edit: anyone downvoting care to indicate why? it seems rather pertinent to name the owner, given the scale, and the potential impact of using such technology at scale.

2 comments

I generally downvote complaints about the title of articles. (I don't downvote requests to change the title on HN though.)
there was a bit more to my comment than a “this title is bad.”

do you know of gannett? legitimately curious.

The thesis of your comment seems to be that Gannet should have been in the title, with your other two points being supporting evidence.

I've never heard of Gannet before today.

I don't really mean much by the downvote. It's a personal pet peeve of mine when people comment on the headline, and I think it's against the spirit of this part of the guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

My downvote definitely didn't mean that I didn't think there was something substantive to say about Gannet's involvement, or that I disagreed.

(The guidelines also tell us not to talk about voting, which I'm breaking of course, but I do try to respond when people genuinely want to know why I voted a certain way. I understand why that part of the guidelines exist, but I have mixed feelings about it, I don't see how else people are meant to know why they were downvoted.)

> I've never heard of Gannet before today.

this is my very point, and it is anything but tangential.

thank you.

People think of Google, not Alphabet; of Facebook, not Meta. The headline identifies the brand familiar to millions.
the examples you list all involve the “smaller” company effectively becoming the larger.

gannett devours and typically avoids visibility. if nothing else because it’s confusing to the commoners that so many different news outlets are actually the same, without admitting it.

so, yes, what you said. but not quite.

"Gannets" is how some people describe hungry seabirds that eat everything, and by extension children (by my mother) and meeting attendees (by our office admins) who demolish food offerings. So the company Gannett is quite well-named!