From my vantage point, it was the tweet that got most of the negative reaction.
I understand that you reacted negatively to the story itself, based on the first sentence. And I can see why you didn't like it, I'll address that in a second.
But from what I saw, I did a Facebook post on the SJHN Facebook, which just used the title of the story. Not a lot of comments, that I saw.
The story itself on SJHN, in the comments, didn't see much of any upset reaction.
For Twitter, believe me or not, I really took the quote I pulled in the positive sense, that there was no threat of the Sharks leaving the Bay Area. From my memory, a couple years ago, when there was a lot of talk about the Google project, I don't recall any concrete commitment from Becher about staying in the Bay Area. So I thought it was a positive news-worthy quote.
But like I said, I do see why fans took that the way that they did.
Anyway, these are the main three areas where I check reactions to a story that I wrote. It's not a foolproof way of circling back, but FB/Twitter are my main drivers of traffic, and of course, the commenters on my site, they're often the subscribers, the backbone of my business.
As for the story itself, the first sentence, and I'm not claiming journalistic reasons or I got this from J-school (I don't have a journalism degree), I like to get people's attention, as long as it stays in bounds of accuracy and what the story is about. Yes, it's to keep you reading. But it's also accurate, I argue.
There's also a reason that I pulled back from the first sentence in my second sentence...what's said in the first sentence is certainly a possibility, it's factual, Becher says it himself, but it's highly, highly unlikely. So I wanted to let readers know that immediately too, after I got their attention.
It's also worth noting, this story, though it appeared on SJHN, was actually an exclusive article that I wrote for NBC. What those are, those are full Sharks stories that I write just for NBC. NBC pays for these exclusives (they don't pay me for the pod or for stories that appear on NBC that lead into SJHN articles). So my audience wasn't necessarily people that had listened to the pod, it was to refashion the pod for a brand-new, often more casual audience.
Those stories do go through editors, though I stress, I'm not blaming them for that first sentence. I wrote it, I own it.
Anyway, you can argue, I tried a scare tactic first, albeit a factually correct one, to keep this audience reading...and yes, I did. But I also pulled it back in the second sentence on purpose too. I hoped that the first two sentences would get people's attention, they read on, listen to the pod, and/or read the rest of the story. I think if you either read the whole story or listen to the pod, you get the entirety of what Becher is trying to say.
I will add too, in my experience, readers most commonly react to the promotional posts or the title of the story. So that's why I kept the title of the story catchy but with full sense of what the story is about, at least best I can in limited characters. And I sincerely thought I did that with my Twitter post, but I was clearly wrong in that.
There's a balance in all this, of course, of getting people's attention but not putting out clickbait.
So I do take greater pains in those areas to not write clickbait. I'm not always right, but I do try, my reputation matters there. So it was discouraging that I messed up on my Twitter post (I get why Sharks/Bay Area fans were mad) and that content aggregators took the quote a way different place than intended (not so much my fault, in my opinion).
In the story itself, there's more space to be creative, have creative misdirection (like my first sentence) and stuff like that. I think you called it "scroll bait", which sure, I can see that.
If I was writing a straight news story, where the lede is supposed to summarize the story, you would be 100 percent correct in your criticism. But this was not a straight news story, I was trying to present the meat of the podcast to new readers and keep them reading until the end (but not deceptively).
Even in more of a news story, I like to be more clever with my first sentence, case in point, this story:
The future’s so bright for Igor Chernyshov…he’s gotta wear sunblock? That’s what the 2024 second-round pick, who just signed with the San Jose Sharks, learned recently when he was at agent Dan Milstein’s pre-Draft showcase in Florida. According to an exclusive interview, in Russian, with Sergey...
sanjosehockeynow.com
This may also be my Creative Writing background probably coming to the fore too. Honestly, when writing, I often spend more time on first sentences than anything else. I do try to be clever, but I can see why it backfired on me here.
Anyway, I get why you didn't like the first sentence. In a vacumn, I agree that it is a poor and misleading representation of the Becher interview.
What I've taken from this, this applies to the tweet and the first sentence, it's a very meaningful topic to the fans, so I should be doubly, triply careful with how I treat it. And I wasn't. No one cares about what I call a creative misdirection in say an Igor Chernyshov signing story.
I promise you, the tweet and the first sentence isn't worth any money made from it -- the money I do rely on to keep doing this is from subscribers, ad money, as some of you have noted here, is very fickle, so I don't bother chasing that as much. I also don't want to chase that, because I believe that would cost me my hard-earned reputation, and for little reward, anyway.
Anyway, bigger picture, I'm just trying to explain what I saw and what I was trying to do.
Please PM me (or we can continue the discussion here) if you have any questions or critiques. I'm happy to keep talking about it.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for caring.