So, it's a carry over from glossy print magazines, which is probably an effective tool, when your periodical is adrift in a sea of other periodicals, and you ne

So, it's a carry over from glossy print magazines, which is probably an effective tool, when your periodical is adrift in a sea of other periodicals, and you need to catch the reader's eye, as they skim through 400 pages, like a flipbook animation, scanning for content. It's supposed to be a climactic snippet of a punchline without the set up, presented significantly earlier in the article than it's actual inline appearance, so that the reader has a hard time finding it in the normal scale wall-of-text, and can't skim to it. Then the time they spend sifting through the article, they read more of it, and (if it's a good article) they become more enticed into buying the magazine, as the newstand clerk scowls at them, because what is this? A library? No reading! But damn it! I need to know the whole joke! I guess I'll just buy it an read the rest on the train... That's how those things are supposed to work. But they're a little anachronistic for the internet. Some people are just attached to the look and feel of the design, probably. But on a web page that you scroll through, it's much less effective at courting the reader, and in this particular instance, the examples are intrusive, and counter-productively placed right next to the passages from which they originate.