Less puns in headlines please Around Town, posted by PAW Reader, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood, on Feb 14, 2013 at 8:48 am
Am I the only one getting tired of all the puns in news headlines. It detracts from the news itself and often gives the wrong slant as it may give a different slant or bias in the headline than the news itself warrants.
Some examples
Electric car company DRIVING out of Palo Alto
Housing winning KEY vote
Wrestlers miss PINNING DOWN
I don't find it clever, just a lowering of standards.
By the way, it isn't just PAW, but broadcast news items too.
We are intelligent people, we don't need silly puns to make us want to read an article.
Posted by Anon., a resident of the Crescent Park neighborhood, on Feb 17, 2013 at 6:56 pm
This is all about selling advertising ....
First, you have to get people's eyes, and most people react to things that pop up certain networks in their brain more strongly ... and puns do that ... at least for some, enough to make a difference.
So, then you read the byline, but they cannot as they used to, just give you a summary of the story, they have to tease you so that you go to another level of advertising and see more ads and make more money for the website.
Then, if there is any audio or video connected to the story they will force you to wait through a commercial ... or two before giving you the story, and then when it's over they continue to run commercials often until you are forced to leave the page.
I am sick of it. Our Congressperson Anna Eshoo took I don't know how many years or decades to finally pass regulating the volume of TV commercials, but now everything is on the Internet, and who knows if or how they enforce that anyway?
The thing is that human behavior can be captured, analyzed, condensed and used to walk us right down the trail they want us to go, often without every being aware of it. There are so many tricks that are pulled on us, that in an age of networking and neuroscience I think all of these kinds of interactions ought to be regulated because if we do not we are not real people, we are just robots programmed to work for someone else without any say or votes on it.
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