Jon Stewart: Blogs Must Be Crazy
I’m a bit behind on my “Daily Show” viewing, so hadn’t yet seen this segment where Jon Stewart pokes fun at some blogs for the use of outlandish headlines:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Blogs Must Be Crazy | ||||
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Amusingly, Media Bistro’s Tina Dupuy does the very thing Stewart is lampooning, titling the post “Jon Stewart Takes on Blogs.” That’s not really what he’s doing. But it served the intended purpose: Getting me to click though in the link from an email.
Commenters occasionally chide me for hyperbolic headlines at OTB, noting that they often don’t match the overstated conclusion of the post. But I write post titles with search engines and RSS feed subscribers, rather than faithful readers, in mind. That leads to keyword-packed, pithy, and sometimes overstated titles. That, and the fact that my posts are often written to dispel a meme I’m seeing circulated elsewhere, so the post title often repeats the meme.
The practice of which Stewart makes sport, though, seems to be something different and mostly contained to blogs aimed at and written by people substantially younger than either himself or me. It’s a product of the video game and texting culture where everything is “pwned” this and “destroy” that. So the writers of the posts in question — and their intended audience — likely interpret the words in a much more benign way than readers outside that culture would.
So when James Joyner uses sensationalist headlines, he’s just writing “post titles with search engines and RSS feed subscribers, rather than faithful readers, in mind”. When everyone else does it, they’re pandering to their immature ADHD-riddled audience.
Uh, no. My point is that Stewart is lampooning the use of the verbs “Destroyed” and “Eviscerated” and such in headlines — which I never use in these instances — and that these words mean something different to 20-somethings than to 40-somethings like Stewart and myself.