I'm not going to make any attempt to make this piece match the format of previous posts on this site. I don't think that works in this case.
I posted this article to Hacker News with the title A viral photograph of "ironic hatred" and the deafening silence that followed. It's a well-written and even-handed piece, but the title is basically clickbait that tells you nothing.
The actual title is: The Baraboo Nazi Prom Photo Shocked The World. The City’s Response Shocked Its Residents. It is essentially designed to have you read the article just to find out what shocking thing the city did.
I'm not sure why it was titled that way. I think the most charitable explanation is that it's a surprisingly even-handed piece on a very difficult topic. This makes it even harder to title than usual, and titles are already hard.
I will note that the original title also did not make it clear to me what was meant by "city." I kept looking for some official response from the city government. The piece is more about the city generally -- various residents involved in this unfortunate debacle, school staff and their struggles to figure out how to respond appropriately in the face of an unfortunate and ambiguous photo going viral and the world coming down on them like a ton of bricks, etc.
No, I'm not defending how they handled the situation. Ideally, the photo simply should have never been made public. It should have been edited out of the photographer's website as a case of "Whoops! That didn't go as planned!"
But I actually do have some sympathy for the fact that the internet sometimes drags things out into the light of day and casts a glaring spotlight on them in a way that both magnifies the issue and actively seeks to vilify people such that there is no good answer. It isn't surprising that the response from a lot of unprepared people in small town America was a policy the article describes at one point as omertà .
I had to look it up. It wasn't a word I knew.
Omertà is the word for the Mafia's code of silence and policy of non-cooperation with authorities so as to not give up any evidence to them.
I will note that the piece is so hard to title, I halfway expect the Hacker News mods to change the title if it gets any traction. So if you click the link above and the title on Hacker News is different from the one listed here, that's probably why.
I posted this article to Hacker News with the title A viral photograph of "ironic hatred" and the deafening silence that followed. It's a well-written and even-handed piece, but the title is basically clickbait that tells you nothing.
The actual title is: The Baraboo Nazi Prom Photo Shocked The World. The City’s Response Shocked Its Residents. It is essentially designed to have you read the article just to find out what shocking thing the city did.
I'm not sure why it was titled that way. I think the most charitable explanation is that it's a surprisingly even-handed piece on a very difficult topic. This makes it even harder to title than usual, and titles are already hard.
I will note that the original title also did not make it clear to me what was meant by "city." I kept looking for some official response from the city government. The piece is more about the city generally -- various residents involved in this unfortunate debacle, school staff and their struggles to figure out how to respond appropriately in the face of an unfortunate and ambiguous photo going viral and the world coming down on them like a ton of bricks, etc.
No, I'm not defending how they handled the situation. Ideally, the photo simply should have never been made public. It should have been edited out of the photographer's website as a case of "Whoops! That didn't go as planned!"
But I actually do have some sympathy for the fact that the internet sometimes drags things out into the light of day and casts a glaring spotlight on them in a way that both magnifies the issue and actively seeks to vilify people such that there is no good answer. It isn't surprising that the response from a lot of unprepared people in small town America was a policy the article describes at one point as omertà .
I had to look it up. It wasn't a word I knew.
Omertà is the word for the Mafia's code of silence and policy of non-cooperation with authorities so as to not give up any evidence to them.
I will note that the piece is so hard to title, I halfway expect the Hacker News mods to change the title if it gets any traction. So if you click the link above and the title on Hacker News is different from the one listed here, that's probably why.
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