So I was surfing around the news this morning, went to CNN and saw this headline near the top
“Man mocks gators, jumps in, dies”
That pretty well tells a full story right there. Or at least 99% of the story, leaving only the question: “How much alcohol?”
You should never mock gators. They have very low self-esteem.
Headlines like that actually make me want to read more. Of course there is often the usual “alcohol was involved” question in my brain but right away my I also started thinking:
What? No safety fence to keep morons from jumping in?
Good Lord - how many people saw this?
Did anyone try to rescue or stop him? Were any of them injured?
Where was this - some northern state where gators are a rarity or the South where folks know them better?
So in other words, the technique works. And with that I’m going to go track down the original story.
My first reaction was that it was a zoo-like encounter; I find I am wrong. More a marina/natural encounter.
From the story:
“He removed his shirt, removed his billfold … someone shouted a warning and he said ‘blank the alligators’ and jumped in to the water and almost immediately yelled for help,” Price said.
Clearly he wasn’t mocking the the alligator, he was trying to hump it and didn’t take “no” for an answer. The headline should have been “Looking for love in all the wrong places”.
East Texas.
How many so-called “journalists” today have ever even taken a class in journalism? It’s a real thing, y’know. And how often have we all seen today’s journalism standards being questioned, by Dopers here on SDMB and everywhere?
It’s a standard rule of real, professional journalism: The headline is supposed to tell the whole story, or as much as can be told in a headline. And the “lede” (the first few sentences or first paragraph) should give a TL;DR of the whole story. The rest of the article takes it from there to fill in the details.
How often have you read a story, on-line or in print, that drones on and on, and after a full screen page or several, or after a whole bunch of printed paragraphs, you still don’t know what the story is? Seems to happen quite a lot. And what is your response? When the writer is keeping you in suspense for paragraph after paragraph, does that motivate you to keep reading? Or, after a certain number of paragraphs, do you just say “Fuck this writer and fuck this story, whatever it is” and give up reading it?
ETA: Oh. East Texas. Okay, then. Hope that alligator had a good meal.
Saw that once I read the story. One of the reasons I’m thinking beastliality could be a contributing factor.
Years ago, I was riding the subway next to a guy reading the NY Post. I glanced over and saw a perfect headline of a short article that told the whole story:
Naked Priest Defrocked
I never have been able to locate the article online, or otherwise learned any details, but with that headline, do you really need to know any more?
I routinely skip the first paragraph of news stories, because they tend to introduce me to a random person that I don’t need to know anything about to understand the story. I’m looking for news, not human interest stories.
(Not real journalism, but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference:) )
It’s satire, but for pretty much any ‘news’ article in theonion.com , all you need to read is the headline.
I am thinking of that immortal headline of the 1970s…
“headless body in topless bar”
I don’t want to poke fun at the dead but the victim looks exactly like you would assume.
What makes this story interesting to me is that I grew up right on the Louisiana/East Texas border and he managed to pull off something that almost never happens. The last fatal alligator attack in East Texas was about 200 years ago. Louisiana alligator fatalities are incredibly rare as well. All of us in the area routinely swam and waded in alligator infested waters without much worry. You do keep an eye on them of course but most people assumed they would never get attacked much less killed by one. Florida alligators can be assholes and they eat people and smaller dogs on occasion but Louisiana and East Texas alligators are generally chill and the stoners of the crocodilian world. It is pretty impressive for an adult to manage to get killed by one. The speed at which it happened makes me wonder if he managed to jump right on top of it while it was submerged intentionally or otherwise.
I agree with the killed qualifier, but we definitely have attacks. A very saddened young boy recently swam in the local pond one too many times around here. They killed the gator and retrieved the arm, but it was too late to re-attach. Kudos to the doctors for at least considering the effort…
My favorite near-local one - “LASAGNA WAS EVERYWHERE”.
That would make a most excellent sig, Sir or Madame.
Yet the gator killed him without using Tabasco sauce. Must have left a bad taste in the gator’s mouth without the sauce.
Some one whacked the alligator.
“Game wardens say a 400-pound, 11-foot 2-inch alligator was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head after a group of men claimed to have trapped and shot it. The men were not on scene when game wardens arrived.” (Wisely so.)
"Judge Rodney Price said the alligator had body parts belonging to Woodward, KBMT reports. " :dubious:
Journalism has switched from being a primarily print medium to the Internet. And what is the Internet all about? Putting ads in front of eyes. The way to do that is to craft a headline that makes people want to find out what that headline is all about, then put the gist of the article on the third (or fourth, etc.) page so that hte viewer gets to see more advertisements. By the time the reader gets frustrated about not seeing the meat of the article and just closes the browser, they’ve already seen as many ads as they would have seen watching a half-hour TV show.