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"And yet it rarely attracts the kind of close scrutiny of, say, a Fox News. And that’s totally reasonable! Fox News is an absurd clown show and deserves every criticism it gets" I find it comical that any write-up critical of a left wing organization needs to include something like this to avoid being flagged, down-voted, whatever, on the platform its being posted on.
If you're interested in observing this in realtime, there's a great Twitter account called @nyt_diff[0] that automatically posts when headlines on the front page change. Really cool to watch articles get updated as stories evolve. It's particularly interesting to witness headline writers grapple with how and how much to editorialize. [0] https://twitter.com/nyt_diff
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
"Coup Klux Klan: Don triggers mob & rob bid"
It would be nice if we had a news source with a feature (opt in) where the reader got an email quiz the next day, asking just a few questions about the facts in the article. The feedback loop would tell us which articles actually make the reader better informed.
Valuable anecdata. News is defined by conflict, (literally, no conflict = not news) and this shows how headlines that express the most conflict get the most clicks. The integrity issues come up when even though the facts reported are real, the conflict that frames them is manufactured - and this is why people reject news. They don't reject it because of fake facts, they reject it because of fake conflict. When I want…
Read local news.
In fact that gives me an idea, a local news aggregator which ignores redundant news and can find the most impactful ones.
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 se…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As frequent Hacker News submitters know, headlines alone can determine whether a post gets upvoted.
But the quote included suggests the NYT does do the latter: "Half of readers will see one headline, and the other half will see an alternative headline, for about half an hour."
So given that the author mostly observes long consistent blocks of time with the same headline, that suggests the NYT is allocating them to a subgroup in a persistent way (by IP or whatever). Then perhaps the cases where they didn't observe A/B testing were just cases where they were randomized into the optimal (hence final) headline subgroup by accident at the beginning, and never saw any different.