Tag-team of terrible masquerading as news
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007Read the following paragraph and see if you can figure out its origin:
Looking to explore Europe by train this summer? The rail pass scheme open to all European residents can now be purchased via the web, the group that runs InterRail announced today.
Well it has to be an InterRail press release, right? Nope, here’s the official InterRail press release. This is actually the opening line to an RTÉ.ie News story, published online today.
Just hours later came this story about “wilfing”, which began with a dictionary definition and was followed swiftly by another question.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind RTÉ.ie News having some light-hearted stories, in fact I’d encourage it if it meant there being more unique content on the site, but this is ridiculous.
For a start, they were filed on the news page when neither are really news - nor are they even written as news stories (because news stories don’t start with a question and tend to have an informative top line). Besides that the InterRail story reads like a press release while the wilfing story isn’t far behind it (although I probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid had they started with “A new study…” and not had the chuckletasticly self-referencial line at the end).
By all means RTÉ should take advantage of its website and have more features, more background pieces on current stories and should cover a wider breath of subject matters (by the by, I’m delighted to see more tech stories go up there lately, although the opening line of this one seems a bit half-arsed too), but this kind of crap amongst the main news page is about as welcome as a “cute puppy does a handstand” story is at the end of the Six-One News… not to mention the fact that they’re so poorly structured and so blatantly promotional.
Blogs elsewhere
April 11th, 2007 at 12:39 am
The first two sound like a student or maybe young journalist tbh. It’s the kind of story (ie press release) they would be given and maybe the way they would write it.
How they got on the main news section even just with the opening lines is another day’s work.
Another thing, I don’t like how RTE and many others don’t have bylines on their news sites.