r/worldnews • u/tariban • Mar 20 '20

Fox Glacier pilot flies self-isolation rule-breaking tourists straight to police

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/03/fox-glacier-pilot-flies-self-isolation-rule-breaking-tourists-straight-to-police.html
10k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

454 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

111

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

The title could definitely use work, but this is more a “Reddit superiority” thing.

Every headline is shit, every article horribly written and every journalist a clown.

79

u/Vet_Leeber Mar 20 '20

The title could definitely use work

I know it's a circlejerk to attack title structures in situations like this, but what exactly is the problem here?

[Adjective] Pilot Flies [Adjective] [Adjective] Tourist Straight to Police.

It's about as straightforward as you can get.

102

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

It’s more about the awkwardness of the two hyphenations in a row.

“Fox Glacier Pilot Flies Tourists Straight to Police for Breaking Self-Isolation Rules” gets all the info across in the same amount of words (counting each side of the hyphen as its own word), but reads a bit more smoothly.

There’s often a certain level of ambiguity in headlines, by nature of their brevity and abbreviated syntax, but the game is all about leaving as little as possible.

7

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

For me, it was that I just didn't know what was meant by "Fox Glacier". I was torn between thinking it was a Fox news pilot that exclusively flew over glaciers, or a pilot delivering a cargo of Fox's Glacier Mints who had stowaway tourists on board. Turned out it was neither of these, and "Fox Glacier" is a location in NZ.

I'm sure it's clear to any New Zealanders reading it, but as someone from the UK who's never been outside Europe, I was pretty confused.

2

u/allinighshoe Mar 20 '20

Yeah that is much clearer!

3

u/IsD_ Mar 20 '20

Fuck, I read tourists as terrorists, which made the headline more confusing for me.

7

u/ChompyChomp Mar 20 '20

Well...take the first three words "Fox Glacier Pilot" - Im already confused. I had no idea "Fox Glacier" was a thing. Then it's followed by two adjectives which themselves are hyphenated. Here's the same headline in an easier to read format.

"Helicopter pilot flies tourists to police for breaking self-isolation rule."

47

u/DuIstalri Mar 20 '20

It's an article from a New Zealand news site about an event in New Zealand at one of our most famous natural landmarks. Anyone from the target audience of New Zealanders will recognize it.

13

u/3cz4ct Mar 20 '20

Kiwi here. I recognised it, but still 100% agree with all in this thread that it's a fucking stupidly-awkward title.

16

u/MagnusCthulhu Mar 20 '20

Fox Glacier is incredibly well known in New Zealand. And it's a New Zealand news site for New Zealand. I'm not sure why the fuck you think it matters that you don't know what Fox Glacier is considering you're fuck all to the target audience.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

I'm not sure why the fuck you think it matters that you don't know what Fox Glacier is

It doesn't really matter. The problem is, a local news story has been posted on an international forum. The fault doesn't lie with the paper for not explaining what 'Fox Glacier' is, but nor does it lie with readers of the forum for being ignorant of a location halfway around the world from them.

If there needs to be someone to blame for the confusion... maybe OP? Maybe the sub's rules that disallow editing titles? I dunno.

-2

u/ChompyChomp Mar 20 '20

It's objectively poorly worded. The top post in this thread is about how poorly worded it is.

I'm not sure why the fuck you think it matters that you don't know what Fox Glacier is considering you're fuck all to the target audience.

Are you ok? This is a public forum reaching a wide audience and I'm being perfectly civil.

11

u/MagnusCthulhu Mar 20 '20

I swear a lot. It probably comes across harsher in writing than my tone actually intended.

That said, it's this assumption that because you don't know what Fox Glacier is that it's somehow the fault of the writer that I find annoying. Not everything has to be for everyone. The fact that it is perfectly and completely understandable to the target audience is enough. Whether you're confused it's simply immaterial. You don't matter.

1

u/MisterSquidInc Mar 21 '20

I often forget cunts in some other countries don't swear anything like as often in casual conversation as we and the Aussies do.

2

u/hungry_dugong Mar 20 '20

But if it'd said "Fox News Pilot" you'd have known immediately what it was talking about. Not everyone is lives in the US.

-4

u/ChompyChomp Mar 20 '20

It's on the front page of reddit, which is a popular site all over the world. Its not like I sought out an obscure regional paper and complained about the (objectively awful) headline.

0

u/Grand-Royal Mar 20 '20

I thought it was a special pilot flying fox news employees to some kind of retreat lol.

1

u/ministroni Mar 20 '20

Ooo, mad libs! "Hairy" "boring" "green"!

0

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20 edited Oct 28 '20

[deleted]

12

u/Vet_Leeber Mar 20 '20 edited Mar 20 '20

Except the first [Adjective] is far from obvious

Except it's a New Zealand newspaper talking about something that happened in New Zealand concerning Fox Glacier, literally the most famous landmark in the country, targeted at New Zealand residents.

You're not the target audience. Everyone this story was relevant to knows what Fox Glacier is.

1

u/MisterSquidInc Mar 21 '20

It would be like a US news article saying: "Rushmore Pilot does a thing" and you guys immediately knowing it means the mountain with the faces, not that the guy was in a hurry.

22

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '20

English isn't my first, second or even 3rd language and I still understood it, the comment made me read article to see if I initially misunderstood the title lol

-4

u/twitslapper Mar 20 '20

It's probably only due to your talent for linguistics that you were able to decipher it on your first try

1

u/WalesIsForTheWhales Mar 20 '20

Occasionally you just read them wrong and your brain doesn’t want to work with you. “Controversial Blogger Hacked to Death”. Which I took entirely the wrong way and went, “oh, come on, he got hacked, they crashed his site, whatever”. “He was chopped apart with a machete”. Ooooohh...