So I was reading this article about FIRE, and wow is it awful! (After-the-fact NOTE: I don’t blame the author – read on, MacDuff!)
Right off the bat, the author misses the point of FatFIRE and LeanFIRE – these are calculated based off multiples of your spending, not the static amounts listed. That’s just straight up misinformation, right there in the lead of the article. I kept reading and realized something.
This is not an article, as in a piece of writing meant to inform. This is a marketing piece. After the short intro to the topic, you’ll notice that every paragraph thereafter includes either a link to another Marketwatch article, or an outlink to an established blog. The Marketwatch links make sense – the platform is driving traffic to further ad revenue. If I had to guess, the outlinks are paid placement – where someone that wants to build organic marketing pays to have some of their content included in a piece from a larger ‘news’ organization.
Taking a bit of a deeper dive into the author of the piece’s bio seems to bear this out. Most of her articles (and I would suspect Marketwatch’s) fit the one-link-per-article format. This would require contorted connections between paragraphs, and transitions that don’t really make much sense, in order to ensure you hit the beats of the links you’re trying to incorporate. Which most of Marketwatch’s ‘articles’ seem to have. And she seems to be pushing out about 2 of these pieces every day or so – with varying levels of marketing content. If I had to guess, reporters are allowed to write a few real articles but are also assigned as much paid placement garbage as they can stomach. I don’t know, maybe we should all blame Google, I don’t know. In any case, I guess the takeaway is to read anything with a jaundiced eye – even (especially?) if it comes from a ‘news’ organization.
