A piece of rock with mysterious markings that lay largely unstudied for 4,000 years is now being hailed as a “treasure map” for archaeologists, who are using it to hunt for ancient sites around north-western France.
A piece of rock with mysterious markings that lay largely unstudied for 4,000 years is now being hailed as a “treasure map” for archaeologists, who are using it to hunt for ancient sites around north-western France.
If all the necessary information is in the headline and first few lines then that’s a bad article, in my opinion. That should be the crux of the article but the rest should provide context, which is incredibly important to understand almost any important topic.
Yes, that’s how the structure of journalistic writing used to be. Necessary information and main takeaway followed by additional context.
Now you get a clickbait headline followed by a paragraph and a half getting to the main point, but just before it does, the paywall, subscription box, or whatever appears. Because of that, occasionally people will provide the main idea/point (tl;dr), and people then decide whether they’d like to read it or not.
Your concern, I think, which I happen to agree with, is that people less and less bother to then read the article to gain better understanding or context. But it’s worth realizing that in a time when people read a lot more, headlines actually served roughly the same purpose as a tl;dr does.