I've noticed increasingly in the past few years, news article headlines of this exact form: <something good>. Then <something bad>. Personally it often feels like clickbait to the point that the title feels like a disservice to the actual content.
But what I'm interested in is - is this a particular person's style of writing? Or is it actually a trend?
I have no actual evidence but it’s something I’ve observed anecdotally too. I strongly suspect it’s the reality of online journalism: analytics tells you exactly what headline format gets the biggest audience and everyone has discovered it’s this one.
I’m personally a little less convinced that it’s a disservice: in this instance it is an accurate summary of the article, as well as explaining the reasons why you might be interested to read it. The headline could be “The story of some parents creating an app for their school” but that’s actually less descriptive as well as less exciting. I don’t think it’s automatically better.
It's a trend like the "X did Y, that's bad because Z"
I see it as the author trying to force a point of view on you.
"Parents reverse-engineered a school app to create their own frontend to parent data and, after being hit with a $4M SEK fine for data privacy issues on the platform already, school officials escalated concerns over it to the police to investigate who eventually cleared the parents of wrongdoing and now the school is working to license the app from the parents so everyone can use it"
Is a much less catchy headline. It's also far more verbose. What parts of you choose to whittle out to create a succinct headline drives people's perceptions of the actual article.
"Parents built a school app that was so successful that the school is now licensing it!"
It's just as true, but, you start with a much different conclusion.
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Hope this isn't too off topic:
I've noticed increasingly in the past few years, news article headlines of this exact form: <something good>. Then <something bad>. Personally it often feels like clickbait to the point that the title feels like a disservice to the actual content.
But what I'm interested in is - is this a particular person's style of writing? Or is it actually a trend?
I have no actual evidence but it’s something I’ve observed anecdotally too. I strongly suspect it’s the reality of online journalism: analytics tells you exactly what headline format gets the biggest audience and everyone has discovered it’s this one.
I’m personally a little less convinced that it’s a disservice: in this instance it is an accurate summary of the article, as well as explaining the reasons why you might be interested to read it. The headline could be “The story of some parents creating an app for their school” but that’s actually less descriptive as well as less exciting. I don’t think it’s automatically better.
It's a trend like the "X did Y, that's bad because Z"
I see it as the author trying to force a point of view on you.
"Parents reverse-engineered a school app to create their own frontend to parent data and, after being hit with a $4M SEK fine for data privacy issues on the platform already, school officials escalated concerns over it to the police to investigate who eventually cleared the parents of wrongdoing and now the school is working to license the app from the parents so everyone can use it"
Is a much less catchy headline. It's also far more verbose. What parts of you choose to whittle out to create a succinct headline drives people's perceptions of the actual article.
"Parents built a school app that was so successful that the school is now licensing it!"
It's just as true, but, you start with a much different conclusion.