Hacker News Reader

Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

Should a news source be optimizing for engagement, or for accuracy in communicating facts? I understand it's a business, but it's analogous to a bakery that labels all its goods as its best-selling items, only to confuse and disappoint the buyer when they open the box and find something different inside. It may sell that product that time, but it goes against the purpose of the organization as a whole, and doesn't seem like a sustainable practice.

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If people don’t like click bait I recommend not using news aggregators that only show the headline and are curated based on the votes of users who don’t read the articles!

Sounds like someone needs to make an aggregator that shows only brief auto-generated summaries, no headlines or images.

Even better, these autogenerated summaries should give most weight to paragraphs at the end of the article.

I often find that New York Times and other media put important details that sometimes contradict the headline or challenge the main idea of the article somewhere close to the end of the article.

This lets them still claim objectivity while preserving a highly polarizing message.

Journalist here. While I love that there's a discussion about burying the lede on HN, the practice you reference is known as a kicker. It's a last thought that is meant to twist, undercut, or add complexity to the narrative thrust of the story. The best ones add a ton of value to stories and reward people who read to the end.

This has a name its called burying the lead, its used because news papers are structured in a way where they know people have limited attention so usually they don't read to the end. All the important bits are typically laied out linearly, often trailing off at the end.

Burying the lead takes advance if this and puts the important but inconvenient information at the bottom.

FYI, the name of the introductory section of a journalistic article is "lede", not "lead", and the practice is called "burying the lede".

Yes and no. The GP probably knows the story that "lede" is a more recent spelling than you might think. e.g. This[0] article from Merriam Webster says "Although evidence dates the spelling to the 1970s, we didn't enter lede in our dictionaries until 2008." It says the different spelling was introduced to differentiate it from lead (the metal) which at that time was talked about often at newspapers re linotype printing.

That article links to this[1], by Howard Owens:

"It was then I realized, there is no historic basis for the spelling of a lead as “lede.” “Lede” is an invention of linotype romanticists, not something used in newsrooms of the linotype era."

He says he looked at books from the 1940s - 1980s, "The fact is, in none of the dozens of old journalism books that I have examined — none of them — spell it “lede.” I can’t find the definitive first reference to “lede” but it doesn’t start appearing in journalism books until the 1980s. .. It wasn’t until linotype was disappearing from newsrooms across the nation (late 1970s and into the 1980s), that we start seeing the spelling “lede.”

The safest conclusion, then, is that “lede” is a romantic fiction invented by those who were nostalgic for the passing of the linotype era."

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...

[1] https://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/

Sure, lede is very recent, and largely without a solid historical basis, but it's the far more common spelling these days.

I think user written, three sentence summaries for hacker news posts would be nice. I like that I can submit random interesting articles here, but sometimes a bit of context is necessary to get others engaged.

You know of an aggregator that shows the actual headlines? The ones I read use a usually poorly editorialised headline created by the user.

I made zipnews.io, aggregates the news of the day on any topic and sends you a short blurb summarizing the top 5 stories. Headlines are included.

Headlines have become advertisements. They're almost never written by the journalists who wrote the story, they're written for space constraints that change on a whim ...

They're very rarely "accurate" the way stories are intended to be for these reasons.

Have journalists ever controlled or written their own headlines? I don't think this is a change from any point in newspaper history.

I wasn't suggesting that journalists wrote their own headlines, although for smaller publications it was more likely to be the case. I worked at a newspaper in a 50k city and journalists gave suggestions with their copy.

My point, rather, was that headlines slip past the journalistic barriers applied to copy. Often the people on the desk are making a headline fit at 11:45 pm or later and have no real oversight.

Why has it been historically separated like this?

The story is worked on throughout the day/week. It goes through a number of copy editors and revisions. Its final publication date might be in limbo.

It's chosen for Wednesday in the budget meeting. It's 1A material. A cursory headline is written. Then a big news event happens: now it's 2A material. That means less space. The copy needs to be cut, the headline needs to be one line shorter, etc. This happens at, say, 9 pm and the journalist and editor in chief have been at home for hours.

The latency of decision cycle was too great in previous times. Even within digital workflows the length of time between knowledge of final space available on the physical page and when that space had to be filled with text was too short to haggle with a writer. It had to be performed by a smaller set of people right next to the people laying the type of not the people laying the type.

Two reasons: the headline writers need to know exactly how many characters to use, as part of the prepress process, right in the layout room, while the journalists are out in the field, and 2) headline writing is its own skill (especially for tabloid headlines).

Because the headline isn't part of the story, it's part of the index/ToC of the whole paper, so it's written by the staff that put the whole paper together.

Which is to say, it's always been click bait.

It's not an either/or. I work at a place that produces serious news. User engagement pays the bills and it also gets vital news in front of more eyes. Summing up a complex story into one sentence that convinces a reader to click and learn more is an art unto itself.

Except most readers don't go on to actually read much of the article. One of the problems I have with NYTimes (and others) is that the contents of an article, especially if you read the full story, are often times quite different than the assumption the headlines is implying. Afterall, who really has 20 minutes to spend long-form reading a single article? Better for the publication to just tell you what you need to think with a simple 10 syllable headline. (I'm joking here, but think it's a valid observation on others around me consuming the media).

The other problem I have, and why I stopped subscribing to them was their app was terrible and mostly only promoted opinion pieces to me. In fact, I'd love the OP of the story to study how many of the top 10 articles are opinion pieces at any piece of time.

This is my takeaway. There is a huge incentive for the media to make things more sensational or dramatic because it drives clicks and views.

I might also argue that online news drives this more so than print - with print you tend to buy the paper based on the totality of their reporting and reputation versus a zero-cost click of a headline on your screen.

Would you be more trusting of NYT (or other news sites) if they pledged not to look at engagement stats?

It would be a positive signal but it wouldn't be the only signal. You can still do untrustworthy things without engagement stats.

> Should a news source be optimizing for engagement, or for accuracy in communicating facts?

A journal is a business, with something to sell, the news, and the attention of their readers to advertisers as well.

> The New York Times is a big deal. As they tell their advertisers, the NYT is the #1 news source for young, rich thought leaders:

Obviously ultimately it reflects badly on the profession, since all these news sites are using the same clickbait techniques, from Breibart to the Dailymail to NYT, since they probably hire the same consultancies when it comes to clickbaiting design, or at the very least, people who come from the same marketing circles/education.

> the same marketing circles/education.

Also "young, rich thought leaders", right?

Do young people read the NYT?

A simple answer to a simple question: Yes.

It's the goal of Meredith Levien, their current CEO, for the NYT to be considered a "world class tech company"[1]. I believe doing A/B tests is a way to work towards that goal.

[1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meredith-levien-want...

Is there actually an either/or here? Surely it’s possible to write two (or more) headlines for a story that are all equally accurate?

Yes, but did you read the examples in the article? Many of the high-engagement headlines ignored most of the content in favor of a tangential but titillating detail. That's National Enquirer stuff, not what the New York Times has prided itself on being.

I did, but honestly most of the examples confused me. Both the Tesla rocket example and Cuomo story are surely headline changes relating to the story changing? They didn’t add “Cuomo apologizes” to titillate, it’s because… he apologized, and he hadn’t when the story was first published. Which isn’t even A/B testing! The article also more or less states this, hence my confusion.

I think the same is true for the Trump CPAC speech article. The blog post compares the initial headlines about him “claiming leadership” to the ones about him attacking other Republicans. But just from eyeballing the chart, first the headline changes from “Plans to Claim” to “Claims”, presumably around when he started giving the speech, and then shortly afterward it’s changed to mention him attacking Republicans, probably at the point in the speech where he did that. There does seem to be an A/B test between the last two headlines, “Trump Pledges G.O.P. Unity, Then Attacks Republicans Who Backed Impeachment” vs. “Trump’s Republican Hit List at CPAC Is a Warning Shot to His Party”. But that’s not the comparison the blog post makes. And among those two, while the winning headline (the second one) is clickbaitier, both focus on the same part of the speech, and neither is inaccurate.

Are you saying there isn't just two sides to every story?

Yes, so A/B testing won't work. You need a one-armed bandit algorit.

But, from the OP article, that doesn't particularly seem to describe at least some of these cases.

The article is what communicates facts. The headline is just an advertisement to draw the user in to read it. Optimizing the headline means the article is able to inform more people; in line with the mission of the organization. NYT wants to increase subscribers, not ad revenue, so it's incentivized to not confuse and disappoint readers with clickbait headlines.

Is it not the goal of a headline to engage?

Yes, but not at the cost of accuracy.

But multiple headlines can both be accurate with one being more engaging. These aren't mutually exclusive.

Article about a bank robbery:

"First National Bank Robbed"

"Gunmen Rob First National Bank in Daring Robbery"

My favorite this year was from the Times of India on the Jan 6th US capital insurrection.

"Coup Klux Klan: Don triggers mob & rob bid"

That doesn't mean what OP has mentioned is wrong. NYT has a history of misleading headlines [1].

[1] https://thepostmillennial.com/nyt-makes-terrorism-story-into...

"Engaging" while being highly irritating. The first one is concise.

True, but which is more likely to get your click: a headline you're indifferent to, or a headline that fills you with righteous indignation? I think that if there's one thing that the development of social media has taught us about human nature, it's that any emotion is better than boredom, from an engagement standpoint.

It _usually_ makes sense to optimise for engagement, particularly in the US where there's no state-funded media outlet (cue discussion about socialism that will be ignored). The UK has the BBC, Australia has the ABC, and both are state funded media outlets that aren't (at least overtly) driven by views. I'm sure their funding largely depends on how many people are consuming their product, but it's not as though some editor is going to be fired that afternoon if their "Oprah/Meghan" story loses out to the Murdoch equivalent. I'd be curious to compare how A/B testing works for state-funded media vs pay-for-access media outlets

There’s absolutely state-funded media in the U.S. It just doesn’t encompass as much as those in the UK or Australia.

C-Span is a good example.

The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network[1] isn't publicly funded, no.

PBS, NPR, and, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting[2], lots of individual, independent local radio and television stations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...

npr gets like 2% of its funding from public sources, despite being national public radio. they're as beholden to moneyed and corporate interests as nytimes, and as partisan and outrage-oriented too. i stopped donating years ago.

I had to stop as well.

The article defending looting was absolutely a breaking point.

not sure which article was your breaking point, but for me, it's been a steady downhill slide for at least 5 years, with the complete whiff on the run-up to the 2016 election being a real wake-up-and-take-stock affair.

Based on the amount of click-bait from the BBC that gets posted to HN, I’m not sure your state funded option is much better.

I know the CBC in Canada is absolute crap - 80% of the reporting is sensationalistic and for the past 4 years has been focused on the nuances of Trump - not exactly relevant to Canada. At least not deserving of more coverage than domestic issues.

The BBC gets roughly a quarter of its income from commercial sources

https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2021/j...

This is why I’m letting my NYT subscription expire. I see no difference between them and tabloids.

Sensationalist junk.

It’s fundamentally possible to have both. Although, yes, it’s very tempting to sacrifice one for the other, once you start to optimize.

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