Then Verse Now

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often but not always off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. skids wildly on the ice and crashes into whatever is in front of him. It appears on Sunday so infrequently that it's useless to say that it appears on Sundays.]

SA*

A newspaper article is classically written "top down," in the so-called inverted pyramid format.

The headline gives the basic information in pithy and hopefully catchy form. For example, "Viral Texas Chain Collision Actually Happened in 2021."

The byline and dateline tell the reader who is responsible for the reporting, the umbrella organization which you will hopefully recognize as trustworthy, and when it was first published, for instance, "By Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer, 5 January 2025."

The lede (pronounced" leed") is a paragraph giving all the essential information contained in the article. For example:

"A video showing cars and trucks smashing into each other on an icy Texas highway has gone viral in the New Year in 2025, accompanied by the false information that it just happened. It was a real accident, but it happened almost four years ago, in 2021, during a Winter freeze that hit Texas particularly hard."

Then comes the body, in which the lede is fleshed out, usually in several paragraphs, if possible answering the traditional "five W's + how" of "who, what, where, when, why, and how." Telling, for instance, why the old news story is being recycled as if it just happened (a craven gambit to pull in social media views, which worked), what weather event caused it (a severe cold snap which led to President Biden declaring an state of emergency in Texas), when it actually happened (February 11th, 2021, the first day of the storm), and where (I-35 in Fort Worth), how many cars and trucks were involved and how many people were hurt or killed (133 vehicles, causing six deaths and 65 injuries), the wider situation it was a part of (power outages were widespread and 246 people died statewide as a result of the storm), what the source of the misinformation was (a wrongly titled video stating that it happened on January 1, 2025), and so on. The body might go one for several paragraphs.

After the body, minor details might be added, for instance, that a dog was among those rescued from the crash scene, that it took firefighters and emergency crews until the next day to clear the highway, perhaps a quotation from one of the survivors or one of the rescue personnel, etc.

What a traditional newspaper article does not have is distractions inline with the text block, especially unrelated diversions that can take the reader away from the article permanently with one click of the mouse!

A newspaper article also doesn't have a concluding or summarizing paragraph, for two reasons. First, all the salient information has already been given at the top; and second, so that compositors can trim the end of the article to fit whatever column space is available without omitting any necessary information—all they'll cut is, perhaps, the part about the dog.

As opposed to
the reason this format evolved this way is based on the way people read newspapers. Few people read newspaper articles all the way to the end. You scan the article headlines and read on if the subject grabs you. If you're only moderately interested you might stop after the lede; if you're engaged by the story you might get into the body, and only if you want the complete picture for some reason will you persist through the minor details at the end.

Efficient. And, one might say, courteous.

Now, of course, if you look at a typical news article online, you might notice that a different paradigm is evolving.

First, the headline is cut off, on the pretext that it's longer than the space available, viz.: "Photographers Missing Out on Free In...", such that you have to click on it just to see the whole dang headline and find out what the freaking article is even about. There's no byline, no name of any umbrella organization as the source of the article so you can get a clue of whether it's trustworthy or not (or a completely anodyne name you don't recognize at all), and the article is undated—which is especially unhelpful if you're looking for up-to-date information. Then, the headline turns out to be a deliberate tease: "Photographers Missing Out on Free Insurance That Could Save Them THOUSANDS!!!" Scrolling down, you come to a brief paragraph with seven typos, wrong words, and illiterate sentence structure, on account of the article has been written by a combination of ChatGTP and a non-native ESL speaker who resides in a distant land—no hate implied; he's making his $7 a day and he both needs it and earns it—bracketed by three large advertisements, including one right below the snippet of text. Your skills at discriminating meat from crud online are constantly improving, of course. Because they must. The text is just some blather about how times are tough and everyone needs to save money and you could too if you only knew to do THIS. You scroll down, blood pressure rising, and get to the second paltry text block, at which point the ads refresh and cause the text block to reset two inches down from where it just was, causing you to lose your place. Doesn't matter, because the second text block contains nothing but renewed teasing promises to get you to keep scrolling.

This goes on until you have seen 19 ads you have absolutely zero interest in and two which you were kinda tempted to click on except you know better because you're smarter than Pavlov's dogs. At which point, the article tells you that you might want to think about putting your cameras on your homeowner's insurance using a rider, which you already knew.

And then to add insult to injury you have to figure out how to get back to the page you were reading before you took the stupid bait and got a sharp fishhook painfully stuck in your lip. Which you do, only to find that the main page itself has refreshed in the meantime and the other articles you kinda wanted to read have disappeared and been replaced by something else.

Ah, progress.  

Mike

*Satire alert.

P.S. Culture and society will figure out the internet eventually. Right now it might resemble the picture above, but newspapers themselves had a "wild west" phase in which there were limitations but few rules. Standards of book publishing had to evolve over centuries. The ethics of good journalism and accepted best practices, such as simple matters of format, had to evolve slowly as practical effects were observed and lessons were learned. The same thing will happen to media online...someday.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ed Otten: "Brilliant expose of the time-wasting machinations of the web. Particularly troubling are the algorithms which dog one between devices. Showing even a modicum of interest in a product results in a lingering cascade of related click baits...sooo annoying and, in a sense, quite frightening!"

Charles Rozier: "The really crazy thing is that these clickbait headlines you describe appear even within paid sites like the New York Times, which supposedly is not competing with itself for clicks. It seems to have become one of those cultural decline things…."

Craig: "I hate the teaser headlines that are becoming common even in mainstream news outlets. The San Francisco Chronicle has an annoying habit of writing headlines like, 'This Bay Area City Now Has Highest Property Values in Northern California,' making you click on it just to find out what city they're talking about, even though the actual name of the city would have taken up less space than 'This Bay Area City.'"

Mike replies: You make a good point: that the bad habits of online writing are spilling over into old-time print media now too.

Comments

[Rick Neibel]

FWIW, I *ALWAYS* command-click links to open the link in a new tab (in Chrome, via a downloadable extension). That way, I can just close that new window when done and go back to where I was on the original page. (Mostly works. Some cursed sites revert to the top of the original page.)

[Kenneth Tanaka]

And that’s why ad-blocking systems were invented.

Believe me, it physical newspapers had interactivity (don’t suggest it) you’d never have reached the old sports pages.

(Extra credit question: When is the last time you saw anyone reading a newspaper?)

[Ed Hawco]

And don't forget the dreaded comment thread, which is invariably a mix of people very earnestly discussing the topic (for or against), indicating they take the article very seriously, or people taking swipes at each other for being idiots.

Also: for web browser reading (phone, tablet, or computer), "right-click > open in new tab" is your friend for not losing the original page from which you followed your distraction.

[Ken]

"(Extra credit question: When is the last time you saw anyone reading a newspaper?)"

Can't speak for MJ, but for me: ~ 15 minutes ago, in my kitchen.

[Stephen S.]

This is why I now use Brave as my web browser on both my phone and computer - the hellscape of modern ads. Combined, they claim to have blocked nearly a million ads, consisting of tens of gigabytes of data and a fully workday of downloading time, and I don't doubt it, because whenever I use a different browser on some other device, I don't even recognize many of the sites I regularly visit once they are overcome with their normal advertisements. I know this deprives sites of revenue, but when sites introduced ads that would make their written text disappear while a video advertisement played, with the text sometimes never reappearing even after the ad finished, they crossed the line in what I was willing to put up with in order to read their content.

[MikeR]

@Ken Tanaka: "(Extra credit question: When is the last time you saw anyone reading a newspaper?)"

My ten year old grandson. We save the comics section of the Philadelphia Sunday Inquirer for him, and give him a couple weeks of them whenever we stop over. I enjoy seeing this kid plop himself on the sofa and hold his arms out wide to read the inside strips.

(We subscribe to the digital edition, and have the Sunday paper delivered, partly to support our local paper, and partly because we wouldn't read the comics on-line)

[Matt]

It’s getting to the point where much of the web is all but unusable on my phone. Many sites will no longer load properly with my add block enabled, but disabling it loads so many ads into the page that my browser regularly crashes from running out of memory just trying to scroll to the relevant bit of information at the bottom.

[DavidB]

"...This goes on until you have seen 19 ads..."

Ad blockers and a hosts file. I rarely see ads.

[GKFroehlich]

Which part is the satire—the main body, or the P.S.?

And, whatever happened to “versus”?

[Roger Bradbury]

This is why I seldom bother with online news. Another great annoyance I've recently discovered (Yep, I'm a grumpy old man) are how-to articles that are nothing but clickbait.

I read the first section which summarises the matter, then scroll down past the first advert to find the matter summarised again, but slightly differently.

I now know this means it's time to click away, but in the past I've kept reading until I realise they know even less about the subject than I do.

Added to this are the various useless search engines. I might as well go down the local library; it'll be quicker.

Rant over.

[HBernstein]

Mike look up the definition of “enshittification”. Something will have to change in the next few years, otherwise the world wide web will seize up entirely.

[Mike Chisholm]

Still trying to figure out whether "verse" vs. "versus" is deliberate, a typo, or, um -- surely not? -- nescience... Got to be an MJ-style joke in there somewhere...

Mike

[Thom Hogan]

Yes, this is a thing that's happened. Unfortunately it has side impacts that are hugely negative (e.g. people only looking at headlines because to get to any true and useful information takes too much effort and time, thus the headline stands as the fact).

Free is (almost) never free. While it's true that we've had a number of media appear that has low barrier to entry—starting with the Laserwriter and PageMaker for newsletters, et.al., and now advancing to Web, podcasts, YouTube, et.al.—ultimately if time and energy is being put into those, someone is expecting a payback. Ultimately, the cow in the trailer is driving the vehicle.

[Severian]

Since Mike is so careful and so detail oriented, I am unable to resist pointing out that I think he needs to update his copyright(c)

"Original contents copyright 2024"

[Speed]

On my real computer both Wall Street Journal and New York Times look a lot like real newspapers with a "front page", headlines and a paragraph or two of each front-page story -- four columns across for WSJ.

On my phone each is limited by screen size to a headline and copy in a single "column" but the "front page" stories are available (with one paragraph of copy) by scrolling down the page.

Mornings, my wife and I sit at the dining room table reading our newspapers -- a "dead tree" version for Linda and a digital version for me.