Tweet Journalism

[frankbmd]

There are numerous ways to justify the internet that are positive.

1. Defrauding baseball card collectors

2. Facilitating one click purchasing of stuff you don't really want from Amazon

just to name a couple, but what really bothers me has nothing to do with the hobby.

The internet journalist

Click on a link and what do you get.

A very brief "article" (should be called an articlette)

Embedded in the articlette is invariably one, or frequently more than one, copied and pasted tweet, which is the basis if the whole link.

Either above or below the tweet the contents of the tweet is regurgitated word for word in the text of the articlette, making what looks like a very short articlette an even shorter articlette.

The articlette often adds exactly zero information that you didn't derive from the headline that caused you to open the link in the first place.

The articlette, no matter how short, usually includes at least one misspelled word or glaring grammatical error.

And then at the bottom there is a thumbnail photo of the dufus who wrote it with a paragraph containing information about which idiots hired him as a journalist to write the articlette.

And although dufus is spelled correctly in the preceding sentence, it was rejected by my spellcheck, that was no doubt created by another dufus.

.....and so it goes.