Once again, like a broken record, I write to extoll the problem of editors writing bad headlines. Here, the headline discards the nuance which the article writer tried to put upfront. Rolling resistance is precisely what slows down a tire, but how it’s measured and distilled down to a single number for comparison does not necessarily paint the full picture.
As part of any respectable scientific endeavor, bicyclerollingresistance.com spells out their exact test regime, which puts the subject tire against a 77 cm drum with a surface approximating a road surface. Naturally then, when taking the same tire onto gravel, we cannot possibly expect it to behave the same as these laboratory conditions.
Indeed, we should not be surprised that tires are more nuanced than singular performance characteristics, when ridden in real life. The editor falsely suggests in the headline that rolling resistance is not the end-all-be-all. But in reality, it actually is, but the laboratory tests aren’t testing for gravel conditions and so we don’t actually have the rolling resistance figures to compare different tires.
The author did right by explaining how the ultimate test is to put rubber to
the roadgravel. The editor did wrong by clickbaiting.In my testing, this random red tire I found on a junker makes me speedier than a set of Vittoria’s!
I agree with your disdain for the editor purposefully clickbaiting the headline. It’s appreciable to want to get views these days, but it shouldn’t involve purposefully misleading readers right off the hop like that.
Personally what irritates me more is people whining about imperfect journalism which they haven’t paid a cent for. I mean, if someone handed me, say, an apple, and I eat it, I don’t then tell them “Yeah, a bit tangy I’ve had better, maybe get another supplier”. This magazine owes us nothing at all for its product.
As for the “clicks” trope, people need to know that display ads (when they don’t get blocked) earn these publications millicents on the dollar, they pay for basically nothing. What they really want (need) is subscriptions. And I’m guessing that none of us here has one of those.
If someone hands you an apple, you’re right, it could come off as rude to mention it being too tangy. However when a vendor puts up a sign that reads, ‘sweet apples here’, then it’s worthwhile to mention the discrepancy between what was advertised and what was provided.
As far as journalism generating revenue, it’s kind of tricky for non mainstream outlets to get a subscription. Even the big players charge so much, I could see people only paying for a week at a time. The Post wants $150 a year, the Times wants double that, and the Journal wants over $500. The prices only start to make sense for someone that’s planning to read just the one outlet all year long. I have two news subscriptions, one of which I move around once in a while and honestly it’s getting tiresome.
It would be nice if I could load up a journalism web browser with a hundred dollars and at the end of the year, that money would be split across all the publications I viewed. Even if I looked at two dozen articles a day all year long, as you pointed out, some website I visited only once would earn orders of magnitude more than if they had successfully served me some advertising on my one visit.
That’s not happening in my lifetime though.
