TL:DR – Adding article summaries to my blog posts to help readers better navigate the 3700 Sciencebase posts.
Back in the days of print journalism, we used to write our copy, attach a headline and perhaps a strapline. For a news story, the article would usually follow a kind of pyramid structure. The headline telling pretty much the whole story, the strapline expanding on it a little, then the article building on the conventional Who, Why, What, Where, and When etc.
Of course, once editors got their hands on it, your sacred text might be shredded and at the very least the headline and strapline would be stripped away and replaced with whatever a sub-editor thought was better. It was almost obligatory. In ten years of writing for magazines and newspapers through the 1990s, it was quite rare, at least in the mainstream press, for any journalist to get their headline past a subbie. I think I managed it once or twice in 500 or so articles for New Scientist, Popular Science, and Science etc, and again once or twice with dozens of newspaper articles including in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and others.
Anyway, the web came along, I kind of helped pioneer science news online just as it was emerging from academia and into the mainstream, long before some of the big names even had a website. With the web, and more specifically Google, came pagerank and search engine optimisation (SEO), and the need to get keywords into headlines and straplines. Then the advent of social media led us to the world of clickbait, and so on.
At the time of writing, I’ve gone a bit hybrid old-new school with some recent articles. In the name of saving my readers time, I’ve added a TL:DR (too long, didn’t read) strapline to those articles. The TL:DR is basically a summary of the whole article. If the strapline doesn’t grab you, then there’s no need to read the whole article, you can quickly move to the next or abandon ship and visit another site.
There are 3700 articles in this blog some stretching back to December 1995 when I launched what I think was the first public news site specialising in chemistry, Elemental Discoveries. It may well have been the first science news site. Anyway, I am now wondering how to get ChatGPT to write the TL:DRs for all those thousands of articles, save me re-reading and sub-editing myself!