Have you ever noticed that advice articles in newspapers and magazines very rarely contain advice that you haven't already heard of or don't already know? There are whole articles that give you no new information whatsoever!
There should be a manadatory minimum usefulness requirement for these articles. They should survey random people (random people within the target audience is fine - I get that the same advice might be new and useful to the readers of Seventeen but old hat to the readers of Cosmo), and ask them how much of this advice they did and didn't already know. If the article doesn't meet a minimum percentage usefulness to a minimum percentage of the population, they have to send it back and come up with something better.
4 comments:
2 possibilities here:
1. You are more informed than most people.
2. Publishers care less about giving useful information than giving the perception that they're giving useful information. Both probably sell about the same number of papers.
So there's no benefit to the papers in having a mandatory minimum usefulness requirement. Unfortunately I think you're out of luck.
I think those advice stories are written with one-source readers in mind. "Have we written about this yet?" No? It goes in. Not "are readers likely to know about this from a multitude of other sources?".
The weird thing is that so much of the useless advice has nothing to do with sources. Like if they're giving advice to save money, they say stuff like "Store brands are cheaper! Borrow a book from the library instead of buying it!" That's stuff you pick up just from walking around in the world.
"Like if they're giving advice to save money, they say stuff like "Store brands are cheaper! Borrow a book from the library instead of buying it!" That's stuff you pick up just from walking around in the world."
That is often filler. Writer is assigned a story, editor says "get 10 items on this," writer can only find 5, sticks in 5 more for padding.
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