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This is true for most press articles.

But if authors would do that, people will spend far less time reading the articles and result in far less money for the news outlet.

I've started reading long articles on diagonal unless the article is very interesting or technical. I visually scan fast and try to extract the bits of information.

Maybe it would useful to submit articles to something like GPT-3 and get a meaningful summary in return.



In the time of print articles it was reverse: you would put all the info at top of the article and then the less important stuff at the end.

That way, the editor can cut the length bottom-up to fit the article on the page.


Now they have an attention-grabbing or contentious headline and first paragraphs, then right at the bottom of the article include the crucial information that means it's actually not a big deal or particularly unusual.


Inverted pyramid, I think I remember it being called when I was in school. I even remember some newspaper articles that clearly followed the principle. They are very rare now.


Our daily college paper had an Associated Press machine for stories we couldn’t send reporters to. You could cut those stories after the first paragraph or two and it would make sense. We called it “AP style guide” articles..


I think Axios kinda sorta follows similar spirit. Headline, critical paragraph, then expandable So What and Background sections.


A.k.a. BLUF – bottom line up front.


Print articles is optimized for reading not ads or SEO. Sadly the incentives makes the reader experience worse.


Print is totally optimized for ads, and has been since way before computers were invented.

The ads just work in a different way (and arguably interfere with the reading less.)


There already are quite a few news article summarizers out there, usually quite good at extracting the gist of an article. It can have the occasional error, but then so can the source material so it's all good.




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