I know that the week of the Fourth of July holiday is typically the slowest of weeks in the journalism business, but there were about a dozen stories in today’s Boston Globe that should have landed on the front page before this one about dating when you have a specialized diet. And I’d argue that “Forget religion and politics. Dating’s newest deal breaker? Diet” has no place in the paper whatsoever.

Let’s start with the headline: the Globe calls it “dating’s newest deal breaker,” yet the news hook for the story is a two-year old survey from the dating Website Plenty of Fish (which reporter Dugan Arnett called a “recent survey).

Drilling down further, we read that the survey was of 500 POF members in “10 of North America’s most health conscious cities,” meaning on average we’re talking about a sample size of about 50 people per city. If Boston was even on that list — neither the original POF blog post reporting the survey results or Arnett’s story make that clear — the 20% of vegans who have broken up with someone because of their eating habits is, at best, a minuscule number of people both locally and nationally.

I’m not even going to get into the fact that online surveys like the one this story is based off of are rarely accurate in reflecting popular views and trends, and that sites like Plenty of Fish conduct them in hopes that mainstream publications like the Globe will offer them up as free advertising posing as news.

The rest of the story is fleshed out with the usual quote-shopping that is becoming typical for modern print journalism: an author and blogger pimping their respective publications, a few “real” people who have had diet difficulties in their dating, and because reading social media counts as sourcing a big-time newspapers like the Boston Globe these days, a Reddit post. Of course there is no link to the actual Reddit post because that would require the Globe to acknowledge there are media forms other than the dead-tree variety.

I expect a certain amount of fluff, filler and link bait when I’m reading free, online publications. But I’m paying the Globe $30-$50 a month for home delivery and I expect something that offers quality reflecting the time and money I invest in reading the daily paper.