I do not get it. The title is factually true to the best of my ability to check, but it is old news. The new news (that the school district is being sue for doing what the main title says) is in the subtitle cut off. Whether 'School district can be sued for removing 1600 titles' would have been more or less likely to be shared I cannot say, but this seems to be just a way of using old news as clickbait for new news.
The headline is shown without context. The first you get more info, the second they just get the headline. Which is about as far as allot of people read on their phones, and let’s face it headlines can be very misleading.
Former Huffington Post writer here (2009-2011). Nothing they do should surprise anyone. This is a rehash of old news aimed at DeSantis and likely meant to coincide with the upcoming Iowa Caucus.
I'd just call it clickbait. We should probably consider it misinformation as well, but it's so universally widespread that I think we have all become numb to it.
Hmm, as any good journalist should - have you put any of this to Huff Post asking for comment or are you just throwing the allegation out there? Could what you say is happening be purely accidental? I’d be interested to hear what Huff had to say in response
I have to disagree with you on this, Ryan. The headline may be misleading/misinformation/clickbait, but I have doubts that the cropping effect of removing the subhead is something that is intentional on the part of the Huff Post. If the shared images of this post have the subhead removed in an effort to misinform, it's probably the result of a person manually cropping it that way for that desired effect. Or it is a coincidence.
As someone who has lots of experience in designing web-based typography for cross-platform, device 'agnosticism' the resulting crop effect that you're showing is dependent on the device/phone and the browser used to view the article with. Smart phones with differing screen resolutions will produce different type sizes and line breaks resulting in different final images. Different mobile browsers will also result in different crops. For example, I tried your method with Safari on an iPhone 11, and cropping a screenshot of this same article did not produce the result you've shown (Safari places the address bar at the bottom of the screen, so there's less image to crop at the top and this results in more of the subhead showing). Cropping a screenshot from the Huff Post app on iPhone 11 also produced similar results.
If there is/was an effort on the part of the publisher to 'force' the cropping out of the sub-head as you describe, there would need to be specific 'browser sniffing' coding involved to detect which device and browser application a user is viewing the article with. Additionally, the character/word count of headlines would need to be tightly controlled to produce the same number of lines for each article, and would need to be coordinated with the 'browser sniffing' coding mentioned earlier. This type of content/editing control isn't impossible or inconceivable, but again, it's a lot of work for little payoff. The first thing you learn when designing typography for mobile devices is it will NEVER look the same across all devices, and attempting to make it so is an exercise in futility and diminishing returns.
Also take into consideration that the Facebook sharing function includes the subhead when the article is shared. The presence of a subhead (or an image) in a Facebook share post is typically easy to enable/disable, and if the 'frame fudging' effect you're describing were a true misinformation tactic, we'd most likely see the subhead disabled in the Facebook sharing functionality as well.
Again, it's possible that someone intentionally cropped out the subhead as a disinformation tactic, but it's unlikely that the display of the article was intentionally engineered by the Huffington Post to produce the cropping effect you've described. Repeated testing with different devices/browsers/applications will undoubtedly show this. Unfortunately, I feel it is this post by you that is treading close to the 'misinformation' line. (I'm a fan and subscriber, but I gotta call you out on this.)
What's really irritating about all of this is the amount of actual malicious disinformation that has been put out by the media about the bill. It was purported that the state was going through and banning classical literature for high schoolers due to sexual content, when in fact, the bill directs librarians to do their jobs and screen the content being put in their libraries and eliminate books that are overtly sexual and targeting children like "Gender Queer" or "This Book Is Gay", the latter of which encourages young boys (as young as 5 since these books are found in elementary schools) to download apps like grinder and seek out older men to have sex with.
I'm so sick of people trying to defend pedophiles or twisting the truth about what child groomers are doing.
I suppose it is possible to be misleading like this, but in all fairness, you have to keep in mind the complexity of posting in several different platforms/formats. I've tried doing so recently and it is tedious work to get your material to display correctly. It involves using conversion and upscale software and then manually making framing adjustments. Maybe this was a product of a particularly busy day. So I'd cut the guys at HuffNews some slack.
While a huge fan of your informative analyses, I think you got this one a little wrong.
Wouldn't any article from any news source with a longish headline suffer from the same "frame fudge" when shared in social media? Obviously yes. So this isn't a Huffington Post issue.
You imply that HP tailored the headline length specifically so that only the headline would appear in social media shares on phones. I consider that a huge stretch. To me it seems designed to be as clickbaity as possible which happened to result in a long headline. To test that, try removing any four or five words and see if it has near the clickbait appeal.
The purpose of clickbait is to have you click. When you do you immediately see the subtitle and the rest of the article, putting the headline in context. Therefor the "frame fudge" is "only" a problem for those who just see the title.
I hate clickbaiting. It is a major reason I stay away from the Huffington Post. But I am skeptical of the "frame fudge" conspiracy you propose here. In J-school we learned to make headlines as concise and engaging as possible but to never mislead. Had clickbaiting been a thing in those long past days I am certain it would have been demonized in editing class.
I'd like to plug Ground News. There's a free version and it shows how different news stories are reported or not reported by various media sources. It also has a "blindspot" section that shows "narratives" that are being pushed by the left or the right sides of the spectrum and ignored by the opposing side. It shows who owns these news sources or whether they are independent. See the spin there.
Looks like an updated version of "Push Polling" used by political campaigns. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll#United_States) A "pollster" would call voters based on their party affiliation and questions in the " would you vote for candidate X if you knew he fact Y" format? For example, would you vote for candidate X if you knew he beat his wife? They were not saying the candidate actually beat his wife, but only "asking" if he did would you still vote for him? The most infamous example of this tactic was George W Bush's campaign asking if John McCain had a "mixed race child would you vote him"? It pretty much torpedoed McCain's campaign early on in the primaries since the campaign had to overcome his war record verse Bush's war record during the Vietnam war. In this case the use is of a headline used strengthen personal bias within groups already predisposed to feel negative towards the opposing candidate. In this case its not party affiliation but social media algorithms that are used to target voters. IMO It not technically disinformation but very effective and analogous to "seeding" stage of disinformation
I do not get it. The title is factually true to the best of my ability to check, but it is old news. The new news (that the school district is being sue for doing what the main title says) is in the subtitle cut off. Whether 'School district can be sued for removing 1600 titles' would have been more or less likely to be shared I cannot say, but this seems to be just a way of using old news as clickbait for new news.
The headline is shown without context. The first you get more info, the second they just get the headline. Which is about as far as allot of people read on their phones, and let’s face it headlines can be very misleading.
Former Huffington Post writer here (2009-2011). Nothing they do should surprise anyone. This is a rehash of old news aimed at DeSantis and likely meant to coincide with the upcoming Iowa Caucus.
I'd just call it clickbait. We should probably consider it misinformation as well, but it's so universally widespread that I think we have all become numb to it.
Hmm, as any good journalist should - have you put any of this to Huff Post asking for comment or are you just throwing the allegation out there? Could what you say is happening be purely accidental? I’d be interested to hear what Huff had to say in response
I have to disagree with you on this, Ryan. The headline may be misleading/misinformation/clickbait, but I have doubts that the cropping effect of removing the subhead is something that is intentional on the part of the Huff Post. If the shared images of this post have the subhead removed in an effort to misinform, it's probably the result of a person manually cropping it that way for that desired effect. Or it is a coincidence.
As someone who has lots of experience in designing web-based typography for cross-platform, device 'agnosticism' the resulting crop effect that you're showing is dependent on the device/phone and the browser used to view the article with. Smart phones with differing screen resolutions will produce different type sizes and line breaks resulting in different final images. Different mobile browsers will also result in different crops. For example, I tried your method with Safari on an iPhone 11, and cropping a screenshot of this same article did not produce the result you've shown (Safari places the address bar at the bottom of the screen, so there's less image to crop at the top and this results in more of the subhead showing). Cropping a screenshot from the Huff Post app on iPhone 11 also produced similar results.
If there is/was an effort on the part of the publisher to 'force' the cropping out of the sub-head as you describe, there would need to be specific 'browser sniffing' coding involved to detect which device and browser application a user is viewing the article with. Additionally, the character/word count of headlines would need to be tightly controlled to produce the same number of lines for each article, and would need to be coordinated with the 'browser sniffing' coding mentioned earlier. This type of content/editing control isn't impossible or inconceivable, but again, it's a lot of work for little payoff. The first thing you learn when designing typography for mobile devices is it will NEVER look the same across all devices, and attempting to make it so is an exercise in futility and diminishing returns.
Also take into consideration that the Facebook sharing function includes the subhead when the article is shared. The presence of a subhead (or an image) in a Facebook share post is typically easy to enable/disable, and if the 'frame fudging' effect you're describing were a true misinformation tactic, we'd most likely see the subhead disabled in the Facebook sharing functionality as well.
Again, it's possible that someone intentionally cropped out the subhead as a disinformation tactic, but it's unlikely that the display of the article was intentionally engineered by the Huffington Post to produce the cropping effect you've described. Repeated testing with different devices/browsers/applications will undoubtedly show this. Unfortunately, I feel it is this post by you that is treading close to the 'misinformation' line. (I'm a fan and subscriber, but I gotta call you out on this.)
What's really irritating about all of this is the amount of actual malicious disinformation that has been put out by the media about the bill. It was purported that the state was going through and banning classical literature for high schoolers due to sexual content, when in fact, the bill directs librarians to do their jobs and screen the content being put in their libraries and eliminate books that are overtly sexual and targeting children like "Gender Queer" or "This Book Is Gay", the latter of which encourages young boys (as young as 5 since these books are found in elementary schools) to download apps like grinder and seek out older men to have sex with.
I'm so sick of people trying to defend pedophiles or twisting the truth about what child groomers are doing.
I suppose it is possible to be misleading like this, but in all fairness, you have to keep in mind the complexity of posting in several different platforms/formats. I've tried doing so recently and it is tedious work to get your material to display correctly. It involves using conversion and upscale software and then manually making framing adjustments. Maybe this was a product of a particularly busy day. So I'd cut the guys at HuffNews some slack.
While a huge fan of your informative analyses, I think you got this one a little wrong.
Wouldn't any article from any news source with a longish headline suffer from the same "frame fudge" when shared in social media? Obviously yes. So this isn't a Huffington Post issue.
You imply that HP tailored the headline length specifically so that only the headline would appear in social media shares on phones. I consider that a huge stretch. To me it seems designed to be as clickbaity as possible which happened to result in a long headline. To test that, try removing any four or five words and see if it has near the clickbait appeal.
The purpose of clickbait is to have you click. When you do you immediately see the subtitle and the rest of the article, putting the headline in context. Therefor the "frame fudge" is "only" a problem for those who just see the title.
I hate clickbaiting. It is a major reason I stay away from the Huffington Post. But I am skeptical of the "frame fudge" conspiracy you propose here. In J-school we learned to make headlines as concise and engaging as possible but to never mislead. Had clickbaiting been a thing in those long past days I am certain it would have been demonized in editing class.
I'd like to plug Ground News. There's a free version and it shows how different news stories are reported or not reported by various media sources. It also has a "blindspot" section that shows "narratives" that are being pushed by the left or the right sides of the spectrum and ignored by the opposing side. It shows who owns these news sources or whether they are independent. See the spin there.
This isn't misinformation. The title is factually true.
Tell us something that we don't know. The press has been doing this sort of thing since Gutenberg.
Search the list of ALL of the books banned in Florida...and at least 1/3rd are "Bible/Bible-related"
Looks like an updated version of "Push Polling" used by political campaigns. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll#United_States) A "pollster" would call voters based on their party affiliation and questions in the " would you vote for candidate X if you knew he fact Y" format? For example, would you vote for candidate X if you knew he beat his wife? They were not saying the candidate actually beat his wife, but only "asking" if he did would you still vote for him? The most infamous example of this tactic was George W Bush's campaign asking if John McCain had a "mixed race child would you vote him"? It pretty much torpedoed McCain's campaign early on in the primaries since the campaign had to overcome his war record verse Bush's war record during the Vietnam war. In this case the use is of a headline used strengthen personal bias within groups already predisposed to feel negative towards the opposing candidate. In this case its not party affiliation but social media algorithms that are used to target voters. IMO It not technically disinformation but very effective and analogous to "seeding" stage of disinformation
Interesting, probably not the first to think of it? Thanks for sharing. Charles