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Ray Bernoff's avatar

Another ugly reason for the "alternative story structure" is SEO. I do marketing writing full time now, and short-sections-with-question-subheads is the expected format to use because Google's algorithm prioritizes results with that format. It sort of makes sense for marketing content, but the idea of abandoning the inverted pyramid to make a news article more search engine optimized makes me want to gag.

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Bill Shaner's avatar

Wow yeah I hadn’t even considered that. Goes right into my “metrics” v good writing line of thought

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Brendan O'Dowd's avatar

Akra and Anokye Krom are both great!

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Kathleen Kulesza's avatar

The Telegram& Gazette is a shell of its self. All of the good columnists left. What major paper has no sports section? If you read the Sunday paper there won't be any coverage of the games that happened on Saturday night.

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Laura Cahill's avatar

Thank you for writing this. The horrendously-worded Telegram headlines are usually a tip-off to how bad the article will be. This week, I was wondering how those two made it past an editor because there was so much missing information. Thanks for keeping up the fight!

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Bruce Mendelsohn's avatar

From a larger perspective, the truly alarming issue is the erosion of journalistic standards and quality—not just in the T&G but also elsewhere.

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