The AP has moved a story that tells it like it is, with no embellishment or speculation. True journalism. The thing is, the headline itself is only marginally shorter than the entire story.
2 Dead in Shooting at Kansas City Mall
(04-29) 14:47 PDT Kansas City, Mo. (AP) —
At least two people were killed in a shooting at a Kansas City shopping center Sunday, fire officials said.
That’s it. The entire story.
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Should I feel weird about watching a air freshener commercial that shows an elephant who’s married to a centipede, and thinking “how in the hell does that work in the bedroom?”
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I’m going to show my age with this one… but back when I was a teenager I did an internship on Capitol Hill and the press office had an actual AP Wire. They were just transitioning to a computer based system, but the US Senate had a lot of old systems still in use back then. It was not uncommon to read through the scroll of wire service stories to see a story evolving, especially a breaking news item. Sometimes they’d break the story with just one sentence. Then about 5 minutes later they’d issue a “replacement” story that was maybe one or two paragraphs (“grafs” they called ’em). Then maybe 30 minutes later they’d send out another story that would say “editors: replace the 10:34am story from 3rd graf with the following…”, which saved time and bandwidth not recopying text that was unchanged.
Fast forward to 2007 and the wire services still move breaking stories with one sentence pieces, to be replaced with more information shortly. And the web site dutifully posts the story automatically, no matter how long or short. And that’s how you wind up with that story.