In the wake of the New York Times recently loosening its profanity rules, they had quite the URL linking a recent story by the esteemed Nicholas Confessore on a Supreme Court ruling that bolsters big donors and party establishments. The headline: “Ruling Returns Power to Big Donors and Party Establishments.”
Not a bone dry topic for Washington. But not a fascinating one, either.
According to a story in The Wire, the shift is happening to help readers understand shit better. See how that works? “If the precise nature of an obscenity, vulgarity or other offensive expression is essential to the reader’s understanding of a newsworthy event — not merely to convey color or emotion — editors should consider using the term or a close paraphrase.”
So what do they use for their short URL while promoting the story on Twitter?
If it was planned, fucking fantastic! Granting more power to big donors and party establishments are a bit fuckworthy. If unintentional, it was probably not the NYT‘s fault. Programs like Bitly, if they used it, generate short URLs at random, sometimes pulling a word from a story, but in this case, unlikely as the story does not use the word “fuck.”
See below and look carefully.
