Oh, sorry
As a rule, the average person involved in the comment thread of an online news item has the intellect of a chipmunk. This is usually why the people preparing those items--I can't say writing them, because most of them aren't written--can get away with having no intellect at all.
Every rule has its exceptions. Yesterday being Sunday, someone apparently did a core dump of old news items over at Yahoo news. One supposes they had a food fight in the newsroom, and decided to run the stories that were still legible after the duels between spaghetti Bolognoese and blueberry pie.
One of the items they trotted out as "news" is nearly the oldest journalistic chestnut of all: the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. This is the one where someone hits the lottery or has a patentable idea or a lost relation, hits the jackpot and suddenly finds their life a) becomes so out of control that they end up in the poorhouse or b) becomes so immensely complicated they want to give it all away and go back the way they were.
This little morality play has been with us for at least a century, going back to the Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry, if not further. The game has always been to ignore the 99 people who are sensible enough to benefit from their good fortune and interview the one who has either gone broke through excess or is wringing their hands over the stress of success.
Case in point: the lead story was about a flight attendant, now 50, who had a patentable idea: a very good one, evidently. She must have been a disappointment because her sole bit of recklessness was to buy one car at full price. She fell more into the "poor me, I'm successful" bin.
Let's prove that comment threads sometimes do have alert readers. According to the story, our heroine is now 50. She patented her gizmo five years ago, at age 45. When she did so, she left her job as a flight attendant, at which she had worked for 35 years, to run the new business her idea had created.
Incredibly, numbers of alert readers popped up in the thread, commenting in various ways upon the woman's first success, which was to start her career as a flight attendant at the age of ten. There were actually more alert readers than there were bozos who lapped it all up, or politically challenged two-finger typists who blamed all the failures on Obama.
Now, back in Journalism 101, we all learnt that if you got them laughing in the lead, it was a good thing only if the readers were laughing with you, not at you. In this case, the survivor of the newsroom food fight had the slowest coaches in the audience world--thread commenters--laughing at Yahoo before they could even scroll down to the rest of the story, which was just as dismal.
Next, more shocking proof that journalistic cliches are dangerous for good stories, and poison for bad ones (sigh).
Every rule has its exceptions. Yesterday being Sunday, someone apparently did a core dump of old news items over at Yahoo news. One supposes they had a food fight in the newsroom, and decided to run the stories that were still legible after the duels between spaghetti Bolognoese and blueberry pie.
One of the items they trotted out as "news" is nearly the oldest journalistic chestnut of all: the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. This is the one where someone hits the lottery or has a patentable idea or a lost relation, hits the jackpot and suddenly finds their life a) becomes so out of control that they end up in the poorhouse or b) becomes so immensely complicated they want to give it all away and go back the way they were.
This little morality play has been with us for at least a century, going back to the Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry, if not further. The game has always been to ignore the 99 people who are sensible enough to benefit from their good fortune and interview the one who has either gone broke through excess or is wringing their hands over the stress of success.
Case in point: the lead story was about a flight attendant, now 50, who had a patentable idea: a very good one, evidently. She must have been a disappointment because her sole bit of recklessness was to buy one car at full price. She fell more into the "poor me, I'm successful" bin.
Let's prove that comment threads sometimes do have alert readers. According to the story, our heroine is now 50. She patented her gizmo five years ago, at age 45. When she did so, she left her job as a flight attendant, at which she had worked for 35 years, to run the new business her idea had created.
Incredibly, numbers of alert readers popped up in the thread, commenting in various ways upon the woman's first success, which was to start her career as a flight attendant at the age of ten. There were actually more alert readers than there were bozos who lapped it all up, or politically challenged two-finger typists who blamed all the failures on Obama.
Now, back in Journalism 101, we all learnt that if you got them laughing in the lead, it was a good thing only if the readers were laughing with you, not at you. In this case, the survivor of the newsroom food fight had the slowest coaches in the audience world--thread commenters--laughing at Yahoo before they could even scroll down to the rest of the story, which was just as dismal.
Next, more shocking proof that journalistic cliches are dangerous for good stories, and poison for bad ones (sigh).
Labels: media criticism
posted by Uncle | 23:42
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