Here’s an email I recently received in response to a “Food News Roundup” I wrote on the Mercury website, from a person named “Rhonda” (who’s apparently quite proud she’s never heard of me): “Just thought I’d check out your article, never have heard of you, but interested in the restaurants coming and going. [You’ve probably figured out that I’ve left the grammar of this email intact.—Steve] It was informative and pleasant until the chick filet part. Then your true, profane, liberal ugly head reared itself. So sad that you had to stoop to that level. You’re part of the dark, ugly underbelly of what passes as ‘journalism’ these days.”
At first I was like, “THIS IS FANTASTIC NEWS!” Why? Because that “chick filet” part—where I wrote that Chik-fil-A restaurants are owned and populated by bigots who should go fuck themselves—was at the very end of the article. This was extremely satisfying, because according to national research, people who read the entirety of a newspaper article (all the way to the end) are extremely rare! In fact, studies show that on average, most readers only stick with an article for 15 seconds before moving on. 15 FREAKING SECONDS?? If true, you probably stopped reading this article a long time ago! (Most likely when Rhonda revealed herself to be an asshole homophobe.)
Then I was like, “HOLD UP, ACTUALLY THIS IS TERRIBLE NEWS!” because—if the “15 seconds rule” is true—that makes Rhonda a “unicorn” among newspaper readers. (An asshole homophobic unicorn, but still a unicorn.) Could it be that only my enemies read the entirety of my articles? Like the people who “hate watch” those terrible Netflix Christmas movies, are my biggest fans actually “hate readers”?
