This is a bizarre headline.
Does the fact that this young man was a musician, the fact that he distributed his music on Youtube, or the fact that he was at a McDonalds have any relevance to his murder whatsoever? Because this just seems like your typical gangland violence of the sort that routinely goes completely unreported.
Is this honestly only newsworthy because the guy rapped on youtube and was killed at McDonalds?
Or is BoingBoing perhaps starting a new feature? An effort to not only catalog gang killings, but to also humanize the victims by framing their deaths in terms of their geek hobbies and places of murder the BB community can relate to?
“Model airplane enthusiast gunned down outside Chipotle”? Or maybe “Owner of entire box set of Stargate SG-1 AND Stargate Atlantis gunned down on front porch of neighbor’s home… but while smoking medical marijuana!”?
Better headline: “Gang member gets killed in likely gang related incident”
But that’s not news! No one’s gonna click that headline and produce ad revenue! They’re gonna scroll right past it, because it’s business as usual!
I mean, maybe you could do a feature about that very phenomenon itself, writing about how people just overlook regular murders because it’s happening to “somebody else” and it’s what they’ve come to expect - “The Invisibility of Gangland Violence In Modern Media”.
But then you have to write a feature-length article about something that really isn’t a story, pad it full of editorialization and bland suppositions, and try to turn an inherently depressing problem into something people want to read - and that’s a lot of work for such poor quality clickbait! Any two of those problems? Eh, go ahead and run the feature. But all three? Not worth it.
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