3 ms·

Is there a term for the kind of phrasing used in this headline? It seems to be becoming more and more common.

• giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Come to think of it, it sounds like the catchphrases you hear when watching TV news. "At first she thought she was safe. Then Florida man showed up" or whatever, followed by "find out more tonight at 11." Maybe it's psychological clickbait?
• flyingfences 7y ago
  It's clickbait, plain and simple.
  • dpedu 7y ago
    It's certainly the latest form of clickbaity, but there's some quality that differentiates it from other clickbaity titles like "You wouldn't believe what <celeb>'s <object> is!", etc. It's an odd sort of setup and punchline.
• corobo 7y ago
  'Clickbait' if you're nice, 'trash-tier journalism' if you're not
  • htfu 7y ago
    Remember journalists don't get to write their own headlines, headlines frequently vary between print and digital, and as another comment pointed out even gets A/B'd in digital, so please don't blame the journalism. Don't get me wrong, I hate the phenomenon as much as anyone, and its fine to judge a product by its sum total, but as things stand today it's a bit like saying "The new MBP sucks. Just look at all the gratuitous parallax on the product webpage!". Doesn't compute.
    • corobo 7y ago
      That is a fair comment, I may have been a bit too broad in my usage of the term journalism. I mean the industry rather than the individual journalists - which would included whoever came up with the headline - but I appreciate I may have used the wrong term to do so.
• xoa 7y ago
  Others have suggested "click-bait", which is probably the most likely term for a headline specifically. It does assume the reasoning though, that it's being done to drive views at the direction of marketing. Which granted is not an unreasonable assumption, even media with very strong editorial policies that will push back against most interference may consider "mere headlines" be a place they can sacrifice to marketing, it's not uncommon these days in many places to actually have a few different headlines created, served up at random to a sample of initial browsers, and then have whichever one gets the most clicks selected as the one that is displayed generally. However if you want a more general term one might be "purple prose", which can apply not just to headlines but to any text in an article. It's a subjective judgement, but the idea is when there is text that is so excessively ornate, emotional, extravagant, etc that it actually breaks the flow of your attention and reading of the content itself. Basically, prose that stops serving to convey the content and starts drawing attention to itself for the sake of itself. It comes from a passage in one of the poetic works of Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, from Rome). Again, it is subjective, because sometimes content really does deserve heavy levels of verbage and different people have different tolerances. But when flowery prose gets in the way of comprehension rather than enhancing it it's a good candidate.
  • htfu 7y ago
    So it's settled. It's purple clickbait.
• BubRoss 7y ago
  "The New York Times used to be a respectable source. Of journalism. Then THIS happened. Here's why. You won't BELIEVE what they did NEXT. "