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!
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.
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."
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.
