Isn't that the Wall St. Journal? I have a sub for the NYT, and it's asking me to subscribe.

Wall Street Journal, not the NY Times.

I read that article the other day - it was infuriating in it's poor signal to noise ratio.

That is something I really hate, articles that are heavy on fluff with maybe 3 sentences of crunch in them. If I want to read a story, I take a book. This whole story telling thing, applied to everything, has a tendency to drive me crazy.

That article is a Wall Street Journal A-Hed - one of the WSJ's funny news stories that they run every weekday below the fold of the front page. It takes a while to tell its story because the story is an extended funny anecdote. I doubt it was written that way as overlong clickbait, since you have to go through the strictly enforced (no free meter) WSJ.com subscriber paywall to read it online.

That shone a light on a browser habit I've started to do. If I see an article I want to read, I generally don't bother reading it like a normal human:

1) reading the bullet list of TLDR points at the top and becz I'm sooo buzy with stuff to do, hit the back button.

2) reading the whole article trying to get past all the drivel to get to the 'good stuff'.

No.. I immediately skip at least 2-4 paragraphs and start doing a search for words that are in my just created inverted-index of the title. Yeah... I've turned into a mini-google borg subnode processing unit :/

Inevitable as others have pointed out, it's just one sentence that is what I'm looking for and I leave disappointed. sigh

Reporters might miss the God complex that Journalism class gave them.