People buy magazines to read anyway, and most established magazines already have fairly stable readerships. The practice of hyping up a story is nothing more than an attempt to increase readership by providing something that they think is more eye-catching or intriguing to interest new readers.

But a gimmick that misleads is still a lousy way to do it, since a mag will drive about as many of their subscribers away as they attract. It’s just too bad that publishers listen more to their ADVERTISERS than they listen to their SUBSCRIBERS. (Anyone can see that increased circulation is profitable to the advertisers, and since much if not most of a magazine’s revenue is paid for by advertisers, publishers tend to defer to their arm-twisting).

Ever notice what a newsstand full of mag covers all vying for attention utilize most? A ludicrous preponderance of the color RED and as many exclamation marks as possible. It’s like facing a concentration of mini-billboards. It gives me a blinding headache every time.

I mean, come ON already! If the Earth and all of it’s stuff didn’t form in space, just where is it supposed to have come from?

It took me a while to catch on to the ‘tabloid’ factor of all these type of magazines but when I did I stopped buying them. It is a real shame that even magazines devoted to science can suffer from this sort of headline scamming so frequently seen in tabloid newspapers.

The thing is the hype and exaggeration surrounding these stories tends to spill over into other areas … sometimes even blogs.