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Comment by owlninja | Hacker News Reader

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owlninja

The title makes it seem like TheStreet is the product but it isn't.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14233293/1/facebook-s-campbe...

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That's a very misleading usage of the colon (:) punctuation mark. Is it even correct to use it like that in english?

Yes, it is used to denote the source of a bit of news or a paraphrased quote.

When the source is leading it makes sense...

Source: Headline

This reads much better

> TheStreet: Facebook to launch news subscription product

I just said that it's correct. Which it is. If you don't like it, great.

This should not be downvoted. One sees the source before the colon more often than after the colon, but it is common to see the source after the colon in some publications. I see several instances (e.g., "Corporate lobbying helped derail border tax: senior Republican") on the Reuters homepage right now.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

I think it is more correct (and less ambiguous) to have 'TheStreet: Facebook to launch news subscription product'

I wonder why they did not use this common variant,

"Facebook to launch news subscription product. -TheStreet"

It's a strange attributional convention used in headlines and links by some publications. I've never understood why, as it reads so confusingly, snd the reverse usage (source: topic) seems readily and intuitively available instead. But it's still common to see (topic: source) in certain house styles.

To save someone the confusion and clicks:

TheStreet is a media/news company [1].

The product in question:

> The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook's Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher's home page to opt for a digital subscription

This HN entry is actually a Reuters article about the TheStreet article about the product. [2]*

[1] http://corporate.thestreet.com/

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/video/14234594/you-might-have-to-p...

* I'm not sure this is exactly what's being referred to, because TheStreet appears to publish somewhere between 1 and 14 articles mentioning "facebook" every hour [3], so this was the first mention I saw as I scrolled through.

[3] https://www.thestreet.com/find/results/index.html?q=facebook

This should be the target of the submitted link instead, IMO.

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