Yep, completely contrary to everything I learned in journalism school.

TL;DR (from the seventh and last paragraph) — "The frequency band proposed for the lawnbot (6240-6740 MHz) is the very same one several enormous radio telescopes operate on."

Depends on the goal I guess. What you might have been taught: inform your readers.

The writer's goal/task was probably something like "create content" in the broad sense.

My personal opinion: please keep doing what you learned in journalism school :)

> The writer's goal/task was probably something like "create content" in the broad sense.

Yeah, in the so-called "content marketing" sense of the word, i.e. create whatever random stuff that will get people interested enough that we can monetize them (or get paid by whoever hired us to do the content marketing).

Source: I interact personally with content marketers on a daily basis.

There are 14 paragraphs in the article.

Indeed there are. I could see them all after checking on my phone; the Wi-Fi in my hotel apparently choked on the full-width ad inserted after the seventh.

Still, I would have put the key info from the seventh paragraph into the first, e.g.:

"WHO CAN HATE a Roomba? Astronomers, that’s who, because the latest models in the domestic robot family interfere with the radio frequencies used by major astronomical observatories..."

Filling space is how they justify their jobs. The entire article could have been a few small paragraphs.