QUESTION
This is something that's bugged me for years: I'll be reading a story on ESPN and notice that the first paragraph is dark gray, and the second paragraph is often black. I've even taken a screenshot and used a color dropper to confirm, and indeed, the former is #333333 and the latter is #000000. Here's an example
Why is this? Is this deliberate? Or is it a weird styling oversight related to any text adjacent to a floating box? And as a sub-question, is there any known user experience benefit to using dark gray text over black text?
ANSWER
Looking at their markup, the main paragraph styling of articles is #333, which is common as many feel that pure black on white is too much contrast and hard on the eyes.
The second paragraph on that sample page is actually a div outside of the proper p markup. My guess is that this is malformed markup created by a less-than-perfect CMS and/or less-than-knowledgable content editor and/or an ugly hack to get around a crappy CMS (which is sadly a common issue).
In other words, it's a bug from what I see.
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