That’s the question I’d like to ask a lot of on-line publications. And a lot of print publications as well.
Where the hell are the editors? What are they doing to earn their money? All it takes is a quick glance at most modern publications, both online and in print, and you’ll see that the answer to that question is, well, not a hell of a lot. Certainly they aren’t actually doing anything that could be considered actual ‘editing’.
Take a look at this article over at Mother Jones and you’ll see what I mean…
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/heart-disease-coffee-inquiring-minds
The headline reads “Science Has Some Awesome News for Coffee Drinkers”, with the tag line “It (probably) won’t kill you.” beneath it. But that’s not what the article is about.
Okay, sure, the first four paragraphs do talk about caffeine consumption and the fact that studies have failed to show any link between moderate coffee consumption and heart problems. But that’s old news. Very old news. We’ve known that for years now. While the Marcus study is new, it certainly doesn’t warrant more than a paragraph or two because it’s conclusions were already pretty well known.
But that’s not what the article is really about. The stuff about caffeine is really little more than an introduction to the real story, which is an attempt to put together a massive study of heart rhythms and other data using more than a million people wearing smart watches or other electronic health monitoring devices that can send data to the scientists.
The goal of the study is to not only gather massive amounts of data which might eventually lead to the discovery of what triggers heart rhythm events, but to also gather all kinds of other data ‘in the wild’ so to speak.
One of the major problems with gathering data from people in studies like this, is that the data almost always has to be gathered when the people are in unnatural environments which can have a dramatic effect on the data. When you put a person in a hospital or clinic environment, they experience levels of stress that can significantly alter their physiology, resulting in higher blood pressure readings, faster pulse rates, etc. Scientists would really, really like to be able gather data ‘live’, so to speak, while the person is going about their normal day, doing it as unobtrusively as possible.
So using things like smart watches to gather this data ‘in the wild’, so to speak, could be an extremely important advance in the use of these devices to gather genuinely useful health information that could lead to the ability to predict when heart events might occur, what triggers them, etc
One of the main points of the study is to try to see just how useful devices like smart watches can be in doing serious studies about health.
So, what’s wrong with the story? Well, just about everything, really. The editor who came up with the headline obviously never actually read it the whole article. He or she saw the first couple of paragraphs about coffee, and never bothered to read the rest of it, hence the misleading headline.
And the article itself is at fault.
One thing they drilled into us in journalism classes in college and later when I was actually working as an editor, was that every story has to have one, and only one, major topic. Your story can’t be about this and that. It’s about this. Period. Everything in that article has to be directly related in some way to the main topic.
This story is about two entirely different things. First is the ‘beats’ study that found caffeine did not effect heart rhythm. That took up about four paragraphs.
But more than half of the article is about the Health eHeart study, involving smart devices and how important it could be for medical research, and it has nothing to do with the first four paragraphs dealing with the caffeine study.
So we have a wildly misleading headline, we have a story that can’t make up it’s mind what it’s actually talking about. We have writing chock full of cliche phrases like ‘what they learned might surprise you’ that should never, ever make their way into print…
So I’ll repeat the question: Where the hell are the editors???
Yo, MJ editors? I’m extending a personal invitation to all of you. Come on up to Wisconsin for a visit sometime. My neighbor said I can use his woodshed…
grouchyfarmer 
Your mistake was accepting the premise that Mother Jones is legitimate “journalism” in the first place. But I totally see your point. Most of what is on line is an incoherent mess. I guess that’s what one has do to get attention in a world where every idea must be stuffed within a 144 character Tweet.
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Ha! Oh my yes, calling what MJ does ‘journalism’ is sort of like saying the National Enquirer’s “Elvis Meets Aliens” stories should be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The biggest issue with this is that in order for any kind of democracy to actually work, it needs a media that does accurate, in-depth reporting of things that actually matter, which no one seems to be doing any more. Someone, I think it was Pew, did an analysis of the major news outlets like MSNBC, Fox, etc. and to no one’s surprise, discovered that the vast majority of what’s being presented is pure, unadulterated garbage. Up to 90% of the airtime was being devoted to op-ed pieces, talking heads pontificating about things they know nothing about, BS about what C-list celebrity got pregnant by what D-list rapper…
The result is that we are woefully ignorant of what’s really going on in the world. I know people who can tell you the latest dirt on the Kardashian’s, but haven’t a clue as to who their congressional representative is. How can any kind of democracy work if the voters don’t have even a superficial grasp of reality?
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I think the internet has led to a general lowering of the bar for “professionally” written material.
Print Newspapers & TV News were thing that people went to out of habit. They were presented material – they didn’t choose it. In fact they didn’t decide between the Wall Street Journals version of the article and Washington Post Version. They Chose one paper or another first and that was the version they got. If the material was bad, they might choose a different paper next time.
Now people open a browser and they can choose far more. And so now – the key is to attract to an article.. The content is not particularly worth the coin. The headline though, that is worth a lot of coin.
So now the editor’s MAIN job is headline writing. The content – eh, who cares.
Once the person has clicked onto the page, they got the page count for the marketing department to sell advertising. If anyone reads the article or understands it or even if the article isn’t what the article talks about… eh, who cares. The click already happened.
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You are right, of course. There is very little real journalism left any more, I fear. It’s all about ‘click bait’ these days, scary, outrageous headlines intended to draw page views, not readers, because no one cares if anyone actually reads the item, all that matters is that they get page hits to run up ad revenue.
It still irritates me, though. I grew up in a system, was educated in a system where journalism was an honored profession. This… this is just a farce.
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