Because of the SEO, most of the news sites are already clickbaits with junk information in them, it seems like this will grow a new industry: Link-tax-optimization.
And of course their "experts" are just random people who said some things. And they mention that even if they do keep customers out they while still have pickup and possibly delivery. So who cares about that part of the story then? Apparently it's not going to affect me.
The media has done nothing to prevent panic buying and everything to encourage it with these click bait headlines. There is no reason stores should be running out of anything but PPE and other things where demand naturally shot up because covid-19 like PPE and disinfectant. Demand for toilet paper only went up because of the media (and government). The other thing the media has been doing is shaming people but I'm not going to go there.
(IMO: both.)
The lockdowns have precipitated a huge shift in how we eat and what/where we purchase things. The supply chain is responding, but pivoting is expensive and groceries are a low margin business... the shortages could have been a lot worse. Going forward we may see shortages in imported foods/produce due to pandemic impacts in other countries and/or regulatory/logistics problems getting that food to market.
I'm not saying that the media has been responsible, just don't discount the bigger picture of changes in consumer behaviour.
I don't know what is the "ethical" business solution to this problem but I know that Google, at least, is favoring clickbaits and text spinning over quality. If you write a good blog with a single article per week it will be in the tail of searchers below text spinning content that has a higher frequency of updates.
Do you mean your grandma and grandpa can easily identify clickbaits?
The problem is fundamentally systemic. It is a price/reward ratio dependent upon users and the satisfaction of the advertising clients.
I frequent the web sites of a two publications that block both crawlers and social media referrers, and they're quite civilized.
Maybe if they news organizations weren't addicted to the tech companies, their sites wouldn't look like a meth addict's grin.
I'd guess the causal arrow flows in the other direction. Publications that are explicitly targeting a smaller, more specific market can afford to avoid courting the kind of person who get their news from Facebook. But pubs that are going for a broader audience can't ignore this channel.
I know someone's going to respond "maybe they shouldn't be targeting that audience then" but....why? If CNN stops pandering to the average dimbulb and said dimbulb's Facebook feed becomes even more dominated by Macedonian (actual) fake news sites, is that _better_, for either the reader or for society? The irreducible reality is that most people like the kind of crap that mainstream news sites put out, and those people need to get their news from somewhere. (By the way, this doesn't exclude mainstream "prestige" publications like the NYT that pretend they're going for high-minded audiences; their drivel just has one layer extra of tidying up than CNN's does).