Reading the paper, September 7, 2007 (By Elizabeth Perry; click)
This morning, I went to Huffington Post and realized it had become too slow for me. Perhaps as a strategy to generate more clicks and longer visit times, they make it tricky to get to the god-damned stories themselves. I was intrigued by the screaming top-page headline: "Generals on Obama's Iraq Decision." I clicked on it. No story, of course, but I found myself on the Politics page, where I found the same screaming headline at the top, then a photo (the same one from the top page), and then a headline under that photo. I clicked on that head, the same technique I had used on the page that brought me here. This time that took me to a story about top-level secret talks. Nothing about the generals. I backed up a page. Scrolled down. No generals anywhere below. Only now, while writing these words, did I realize that I should have clicked on the top headline on the Politics page, which had not changed , although now it linked to an actual story.
I guess I was a dummy. But I've had similar adventures on HuffPost many times. You click to a page, and then try to solve the mystery of where your desired story is on that page. Would it have been too much trouble for the original click to lead me directly to the promised story? No, but this way they got three times as many "page visits."
Monica and Teri Jean (puppetspuppets.com)
When I finally arrived at my story, the lead began: "WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (IPS) - CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates..." I scrolled down to find out what CENTCOM was. As a trained newspaperman, I know you don't use unexplained acronyms unless they're virtually words themselves, like USA, NATO, or NFL. Why didn't IPS know that? For that matter, what was IPS? HuffPost can be dodgy about revealing the sources of some of its news.
At the bottom of the story, I clicked on a link to "more from Inter Press Service," which I, a news junkie, had sadly never heard of. On the IPS page, I found "About Us:"
Apart from the British spellings of defence and globalisation, this told me nothing. What is the South it raises the voices of? What is civil society? "About Us" was obviously written not by a journalist, but in VapourSpeech. Note that every sentence begins with "IPS," but none of them explains the acronym. Must be house style. I clicked on the IPS offer to "Watch Our Presentation," and got a YouTube video. I listened to more than 90 seconds of vacuous generalisations. It seemed prepared to go on forever without caving in and telling me who ran it, where they were, and who paid the bills.
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