With the increased use of AI and the increased reliance of newsrooms to get a story out faster so that eyeballs can look at the story, there has been an increase in stray punctuation marks. Mostly quotations.
For example, I just pulled up a news clearance site. This particular site is the MSN home screen which is the first thing I see when I open the internet. There is a news crawl of stories that are supposedly curated to my interest. I like to bake and my computer has probably figured that out. Or, at least, the algorithm has.
The very first article that was in the news crawl was an article on pecan pie. The gotcha headline was “Pecan Pie Brownies” Are the Cozy Boxed Mix Hack I Make Every Thanksgiving.
There is so much wrong with this headline. Why is the phrase pecan pie brownies quoted? Why does the news crawl assume that I am looking for a baking hack? But mostly, why is the phrase pecan pie brownies in quotations.
It is kind of like seeing a red balloon after reading about a red balloon. And you see it EVERYWHERE. This can be attributed to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. This is a cognitive bias, also known as the illusion bias.
Me, I just call it lazy editing.
Another headline on the news crawl “Messy Thanksgiving travel” because of the Thanksgiving Week forecast. Why they felt the need for quotations there I don’t know. To draw the eye? To make the headline stand out?
Just watch out for how many badly placed punctuation marks there are, especially the quotation marks. They are misused everywhere. And take care not to fall into this trap yourself. If school has taught me anything, it is that a proper citation is worth learning. A citation in a headline without attribution is just lazy.
Because it is apparently a hard habit to break.
So sorry if you start seeing horribly written headlines everywhere. But if we don’t demand better editing in our headlines we descend into chaos. And we don’t need the additional stress in this environment.
Also, I would never use a boxed mix. Especially not a brownie mix.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 