Fun With News Media Sites Again

 Recently while slogging through a few articles from the news media, my entire system slowed to a crawl and on two occasions my browser crashed. During one slowdown, I checked Windows' Task Manager and found that one of the articles was consuming 2.3 GB of memory, pushing the total to 90%.  This is because many news articles continuously load ads, many in the form of videos, while wedging dozens of processes into the background which are never shut down even after you close the browser tab that the article was displayed in. After looking at the news each morning my system ends up being filled with sometimes hundreds of processes running in the background, which I have to tediously shut down manually one by one using Task Manager (which doesn't allow selecting more than one at a time). Daily Mail is typically the worst offender, since each page has hundreds of thumnail images in the righthand column and gobs of ads that are constantly loading. A single Daily Mail article sometimes wrecks my system so badly that even Task Manager is almost unusable due to the system being reduced to a snail's pace (it's sometimes difficult just to click on the entry for the largest tab to shut it down). Many of these articles are also plagued by two other problems: the constant process of loading ads often causes the page layout to shift all over the place due to the way webpages are displayed: if the underlying HTML code doesn't specify a specific size for each layout element, those elements are resized automatically by the browser based on the scale of the image or video being loaded in. This constant shifting often makes it impossible to read the article because it's always moving around. Again, Daily Mail is often the worst in this regard. Another chronic problem is the heavy use of popups blocking the article I'm trying to read. Some articles have three or more popups in a row, then more popups as I scroll down the article. I now reflexively close them without having to think about it but it's still an interruption that makes it difficult to read anything or click on a button on the page without accidentally clicking on the latest popup, which often takes me to a different website that I do not want to visit and which sometimes infects my system with malware since many of the popups are ads by third parties which lead to malignant sites. The mere act of reading a few news articles each morning is a torturous process, and I wouldn't do it at all except for the fact that I need to monitor media coverage of my field to see how badly the media is misrepresenting the subject (which is yet another problem with the news, but that's a separate and large subject). 

These news outlets are often called the “legacy media” because they are gradually being supplanted by social media and AI as the primary source of news for many of us, and hopefully these older news outlets will continue to decline in influence to the point that I no longer need to go through the process of wading through them any longer after they become completely irrelevant. If they wish to retain relevancy, they need to clean up their act because there is absolutely no excuse for designing their websites in the manner they do: I run multiple websites which all have a stable layout (no shifting dance) and no popups, no ads, no 2+ GB memory consumption, and no extra processes wedging themselves into the background and never leaving.  It is very easy to design a clean, responsible layout for your website, and most website owners do this.  

The legacy media is also falling into another trap which is both irritating and also ultimately self-defeating: outlets such as MSN routinely recycle articles from other outlets, often old articles from many months ago, while constantly re-running slideshow “articles” which just have one or two sentences on each page along with an image and a bunch of ads, designed to force people to tedously wade through dozens of small “slides” to read the entire “article” while being hit by lots of ads throughout the process. MSN often repeats the same slideshows up to a dozen times or more apiece, month after month. This is evidently a way for them to maximize ad exposure to boost revenue while also reducing the amount of unique content they need to produce, but it's hardly worthy of a once-venerable institution like NBC (one of the oldest of the original TV networks). 

Many outlets increasingly use AI to auto-generate content, which often produces nonsense while also recycling information since AI gets its info from other webpages. This is also obviously a way to reduce the number of paid staff and thereby reduce costs, but it is also a practice that literally anyone sitting in their bedroom with a computer and a website can produce just as well. I could whip out dozens or hundreds of AI-generated articles each day and slap them on a news website that I host for $5 a month with one of the many large hosting services that offer very cheap services with unlimited bandwidth. If the “legacy media” increasingly uses methods that can be duplicated by any Joe Blow sitting in his basement, then the legacy media will collapse faster.  Maybe this is a good thing in the long run, but right now the auto-generated schlock content just creates more tedium for those of us who need to check the legacy media on a daily basis.

Some news articles also repeatedly pop up later in Google News even without recycling the content into a new article: the old page itself sometimes comes up again in Google's listings, sometimes months later. It's not clear why this happens or if it's a deliberate tactic by outlets to receive more exposure for each article, or whether it's a Google glitch. Google News has developed a lot of quirks over the last couple years, so maybe this is one of them.