That's the "inverted pyramid" organization that is (or was) taught in journalism. The way it was explained to me is: imagine the reader stops at the headline. Or after reading the first sentence. Or after the first paragraph, etc. In any case, they should have read the most important facts of the story up that point.

Holy cow, don't look for recipes on the web. If you're luck any ingredients and instructions are only 2/3 through. More often 23 pages through.

Your comment and my response exist in so many places on the internet, but I wanted to point out that most of the web-based recipes I use have a convenient "jump to recipe" button. I won't attempt to explain what SEO/copyright/whatever reasons there are for the excess prose at the beginning, though.

What bothers me more about these sites is how heavyweight they can feel even with ads stripped. I wonder if they all use a similar, bloated JS widget that my phone cannot run smoothly.

I’ve been using this app “just the recipe” to avoid this problem. It’s not perfect, but saves me 90% of the time. I think I found it on hn originally.

I have no connection to the app, aside from being a happy user

I have a theory that a lot of journalists really wanted to be novelists. When they get a chance to write a long-form article they can't resist the urge to flex their stylistic muscles; "look at me, I'm a Serious Writer".

I was talking to a journalist who worked for a major venue and the metric she cared about was number of seconds a user stayed on an article. She didn't say "this is the most important..." she just talked about it for 20 minutes and the different results from different demographics and link sources so it was quite obvious.

So that's what journalists are measured by these days apparently, how long a piece can keep the attention of a user.

Ironically she worked for what I would consider one of the best players in terms of not writing attention grabbing BS. (I won't mention which here)