Bury the lede!

One of the many ways the Internet has turned media on its head (or hed) is that it buries the lead (or lede).

We'll get back to that in a moment, but first this:

For those who have never worked in editing -- good thinking! But also -- terms like "head" and "lead" are traditionally misspelled in the biz, because when marking editorial changes on proofs, it was important that instructions not be mistaken for text to be inserted. For example, say I was editing a big fat important newspaper. I look at the first pass of the front page, put together by the compositor, and I see that the headline has an error. The story is about a murder at a rival paper, and the header should say PEN IS IDENTIFIED AS MURDER WEAPON, but the typesetter left out the space after PEN. Whoopsie! So I write "Headline should have no space after pen." When it comes back it now says HEADLINE SHOULD HAVE NO SPACE AFTER PENIS IDENTIFIED AS MURDER WEAPON, because my compositor is a moron. Had I written "# on hed" or the like indicating where the space goes, my misspelled and abbreviated writing would not have been mistaken for text to be added. 

Okay, now: Burying the lede. We've all heard that news writing uses the so-called inverted pyramid, in which all the important information is put at the top, with less important info being filled in below, in rough order of importance. This was crucial in the heyday of newspapers, because stories were filed, edited, pasted, and ran within hours, and the news stories had to fit somewhere in the layout. If a story was running long, information of lesser importance could be snipped off without editing. So the lead paragraph (or lede) should have an outline of everything readers needed to know. In my hypothetical case it would be:

• A follow-up on the murder of [victim]
• Featuring our dirty loser rivals
• Police announced the victim died after being perforated with an actual pen
• Any suspects announced or arrests made

The "pen is mightier than the sword" joke can wait for the editorial page. 

If possible the headline and sub-headline would themselves convey crucial information, because that would interest readers and entice them to buy the paper to get the whole story. 

Now, though, it's all about the clicks. So the writers do their best not to give you any information in the header or even the first paragraph if they can avoid it. In fact, the longer they can keep you hunting for information, the longer you'll stay on the page and be exposed to the crappy ads from Temu et al. Take this one -- please:

The headline in the New York Post for this same news was "Jimmy Buffett, legendary ‘Margaritaville’ singer, dead at 76." Right there, you have the name, what happened, what he did, what he was best known for, and how old he was, in eight words. In the online story above you get no name except the news-magnet governor of Florida, "secret" to make it sound mysterious, and first of all "Billionaire," because flies love honey. But if you didn't know whom they were talking about, you'd have to dig around for a while in the story to find out. 

Maybe there's nothing wrong with it -- we all know that the Internet is all clickbait, all the time. It's the only way to make money. If that means resisting reporting the news rather than rushing out to report the news, well, that's our brave new dumb world. 

But it is yet another way the world has been turned upside down. News stories don't report, crazy people get the most attention, idiots are treated as geniuses, illegal immigrants get care while citizens get hosed, tobacco is bad but illicit drugs are A-OK, all official sources are liars, and nothing works well -- if it works at all. 

My grandparents would have thought aliens had taken over or something. Maybe they have! You wouldn't find out from the news sites.