Saturday, May 21, 2011

Online news creating a generation of headline skimmers, future Anthony Crispinos

The online news age has created a generation of headline skimmers and summary readers.
A great many readers are satisfied getting the news by reading headlines in Google News or article summaries from aggregators like the Huffington Post.
HuffPo and others may include weblinks to the original articles they’re summarizing, but relatively few people click through because they’ve already gotten the gist of the story.
In the worst case scenario of people getting their news just from headlines, we could end up with a misinformed populous like the “Saturday Night Live” character of Anthony Crispino, the Second Hand News correspondent on Weekend Update. Crispino is played by comic actor Bobby Moynihan.
A report last year revealed that 44% of visitors to Google News scan headlines without clicking through to access newspapers’ individual sites, according to TechCrunch.
And a new research report claims that people reading news on an iPad are more likely to skim over articles than they would be if they read newspapers, according to Business Insider.
That's why I summed up my post in the headline above. I figured most people wouldn't get this far.

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