A few things, one being the level of aggravation I feel when I see a story on one of the "home" pages I have of something in the news. These stories are being written more and more by what I recently heard called "civilian reporters" I think your basic "man on the street" description of the story. You cannot call them "articles" anymore like "newspaper articles" but just a story. You click in the item on the "home" page and then its a crap shoot if your going to get an actual story...or a sixty second video of the story preceded by an advertisment which runs anywhere from 14 (?) to 28 (?) seconds. I know you all know this...but my issue is, I want to READ a story which might be about a pretty horrific subject, a disaster or something those fools in Washington DC are doing. It might even be a story of human interest or, God forbid, Hollywood gossip! If you are lucky enough to get a news agency story like, AP, Reuters, BBC etc... you are VERY lucky indeed. If you are lucky enough to get a story WITHOUT a video AND ADVERTISEMENT you are VERY LUCKY!
There is something about clicking on a headline on the "home" page about someone or something like a huge loss of life and then you MUST sit through a commercial for anything from Bra's to Cadillac's! I usually turn the sound off but have found some of the ads do not let you do this. If that is the case I usually just move on and forget the story altogether. It is so insensitive to force the viewer, who really wants to be a reader anyway, to take the mind set of the individual who is thinking of the headline they just clicked on and then go to information they are expecting to get and in a nano-second, slap the brain into an advertisement and after siting through 30 seconds of nonsense, you're actually supposed to refocus on the reason you came to this place in the first place. It DE-sensitzes the information to such an extent that you really loose all interest and whatever emotion you might have experienced from viewing it. And, c'mon now, do you think ANY of those ads actually influence the consumer other than to turn them off? I cannot imagine a exec for Cadilac actually thinking that they will sell cars from a 2 x 3 inch ad on the internet of their car driving on a cliff by two morons in Nepal or wherever they are! The only reason this guy or lady agreed to the million dollar contract for such advertising must be kickbacks.
Anyway. It is a very sad state of affairs when you cannot get a real, readable, professionally written, news story anymore off the internet "home" pages. They have and are "dumbing down" the entire country and world and adding to the DE-sencitizing of peoples emotions regarding human events. The weirdest thing is...it was not much over a hundred and fifty years ago, of the six thousand years man had been communicating with the written word, that it took days for a news event to travel from one part of the country to the other, and weeks to get news from the rest of the world! In the short time span since electricity has been harnessed, we have compressed the immediate distribution of "news" into a few seconds of debatably accurate information which begins with an adverisement which no one wants to see...but is forced to.
Oh, and by the way, the video's on the Huffington Post are SO bad and presented with such laxidazical individual oppinions by the presenter (not a reporter by any stretch of the word) is REALLY going to create a nation of idiots!
All for now....