I am probably slow to discover this, but newspaper stories about death announcements, especially on the front/home page, come in to flavors.
“Neil Sedaka dies” (and for or five news items about it), and “Iconic Folk Singer and Woodstock Legend dead at 84”:
It’s Country Joe MacDonald who passed away. Have I heard his name? Probably. Would I consider him some sort of legend or icon? Eh….
It’s all about the click-through rates, no doubt. When the name is known, people will click to learn more. When the name is kinda known, maybe, the key is to hype up the person’s fame to get us to click through to find out more.
I wonder if there’s a scoring algorithm for the dividing line, or if it’s still a gut feeling by an editor somewhere.
But, hey, it worked on me. Not often, and mostly in this case because I wanted to write this post.
