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Probably clickbait, but increasingly I wonder whether things like this can be chalked up to the fact that most online publications are pretty much amateur hours
by karaterobot 3y ago
Probably clickbait, but increasingly I wonder whether things like this can be chalked up to the fact that most online publications are pretty much amateur hours these days. They might have just genuinely not thought about the difference, or picked up on it. Saying it's clickbait implies a level of sophistication I'm no longer sure most newsrooms possess. If it were only that the headlines were misleading, I'd say it was an irresponsible editorial policy, but you see so many basic mistakes in the copy as well that, at the very least, it would have to be a combination of bad ethics and incompetence.
- jahsome 3y agoMost of the time I'd agree with you. But this is the Engadget. They're just too successful/savvy and established for this particular instance not to be deliberate. There is a lot of truth in much of what you said, but headlines specifically aren't really a product of the newsgathering process. They're kind of a microcosm of journalism and treated completely differently than the rest of the article for a variety of reasons, historical and modern. More to the point, in the admittedly small number of newsrooms I've been in, the headlines were hand crafted by fairly senior editors. In any case, the truth is probably somewhere between disingenuous and negligent, but the outcome is the same: more traffic.