Pulp Content and the New York Times’s Dead Palestinian

Editors tend to view wire copy as pulp content. You either edit the material to the length you need, or you can copy and paste key info into your own original content (with appropriate attribution, of course).

Local papers use the reports differently, so editors tailor the headlines to fit available space in their print editions. But space considerations are different online.

Which brings me to the New York Times.

During IDF activity in Jenin, soldiers killed a Palestinian holding an IED (improvised explosive device). The New York Times published a condensed version of a longer Reuters report.  I don’t have a problem with the wire story, nor do I have any issues with the way the Times whittled it down to a terse, 98-word paragraph.

But I am scratching my head over the Times’s headline.

Here’s the original Reuters headline.

Compare that with the Times’s header. Here’s what editors of America’s top newspaper crafted.

If, like most people, you only scan the headlines without reading most articles, you might think Israel’s a monster.

I hope the Times’s one-sentence stories for Apple Watches are better nuanced than this.