Attention Grabbing Headlines Are Hurting Journalism
reesekyler.posthaven.com
reesekyler.posthaven.com
Factor that TL;DR in as fact and you will literally compress your article's body into the title your news feed lists - how do you sell advertisements when your idea is so easily understood it can be represented by a descriptive sentence?
First - the cat is out of the bag, and never going back, when it comes to applying direct response & testing methodology to journalism.
I recently had the pleasure of bumping into a YC-startup called naytev.com that optimizes social content to go viral.
Essentially they work to find the perfect blend of image / headline to maximize # of shares, clicks, etc.
If your competitor is using a platform this advanced to drive traffic to their stories you are either also using it or going out of business.
Unfortunately what works best by default today is PT Barnum style headlines - loud, obnoxious, dangerous, death-defying!
Second - and here's where I'm hopeful - every new iteration of internet advertising / optimizing works great until the novelty wears thin for consumers.
The whole "Dermatologists hate her" headline that drove affiliate marketing ~3 years ago has now devolved to a meme on reddit and shifting strategy due to lowered CTR.
Given "content marketing" and "content journalisms" extremely popularity at the moment I assume that as we wear out the consumer brain with PT Barnum headline screaming we'll see that give way to something else we can all decide to complain about in 2016.
The second problem is that he clickbait style of story is eminently easy to algorithmize. What will happen when there are a million websites running algorithmically generated stories all pulled from each other?
The biggest problem for journalism posed by the Web is that it has made advertising almost worthless. It used to be that newspapers could charge enough for ads to pay journalists decent wages. Now the Web has both vastly increased the supply of advertising space, which even with modestly increased demand has driven the price down by a lot, and allowed advertisers to measure the effect their ads have (spoiler: not much) which has also driven down the price.
Partial paywalls have helped some venues, and that may be the way journalism goes in the end, but subscribers weren't enough to pay for newspapers and it's difficult to see how they are going to be enough to pay for websites that perform the same function and so have most of the same costs.
Most sites using crap attention grabbing headlines need to do so to attract clicks when their user base are ones who scoff at paying anything at all to consume their content.
I prefer simple cash myself.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/author/james-cook
Most of them are "10 things blah blah blah", or are as bad as the article in question. the guy worked for the Dailydot, what do people expect from him? real news? Granted writers don't always choose the title of their article, I'm not sure however if Business Insider even has editors.
At the same time most readers don't want to pay for news anymore.People can't have it both ways.The value here is in the internet traffic, not in the content or the quality of the news.
19 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWDgjPjp1S8
Taken from an article on his novel...
What he sees playing out across the board, from literature to politics, from religion to eroticism, is a “ludic banalization” of the spheres of human thought and action. According to Vargas Llosa, we live in a “lite society that bestows the same supremacy on frivolity that in other times belonged to ideas and artistic production.” This frivolity “consists of an inverted or unbalanced set of values in which form is more important than content, appearance more important than substance, and where gesture and display—representation—take the place of feelings and ideas.”
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There are lots of inferences, playing loose with numbers, citing of questionable sources, etc.
Now, I don't mind opinion. But please base the opinion on something more than feeling, zeitgeist, claims, etc. I'm not demanding scientific rigor, I'm only asking them to use the critical thinking tools we were taught to use in high school or college....
Alas, it seems I'm expecting too much.
This is why I have completely written off consumer-side entrepreneurship forever -- I can build products, but I'm utterly clueless as to how to get the general public to actually try them. How do you get anyone's attention nowadays without breaking the bank?
</snark>
I understand that on a website you want to keep people clicking through and viewing ads, but I wouldn't mind if I could get articles condensed to a dry, informative, twitter size bite. (Edit: After browsing local news and national news, I seem to have the wrong mental idea about _most_ headlines. Double or triple the length of something like "Investigators find 32,000 emails in IRS probe" and I'll be even more satisfied.)
If so, it's been happening for over a hundred years. There was even a clipping from a newspaper from the Victorian era making similar gripes going around on Twitter recently (but you only need to look at the headlines in 100+ year old newspapers to see how it was no better then).
Now that we can't keep this stuff out of sight anymore, we at least need the virtual equivalent of going and bashing someone over the head back.
Journalism and Marketing are not the same thing -- though those lines are blurrier all the time, what with "native advertising". But on to my point... Marketing is really the science of fooling people. Whether it's to lure you into a website, or convince you to buy some plastic junk you don't need, ultimately it's fooling you.
Marketing is a Crime against Humanity.
Oh brother, get off your high horse. Do you know how hard it is to get people using a better mousetrap in an already crowded marketplace? Because many a great product have failed when the marketing strategy was trash. There's an art to great marketing, and it certainly doesn't have to be evil to succeed.
Advertising and marketing are not the same thing. You seem to be describing advertising.
I like the PT Barnum reference by aresant. Just more evidence to suggest history simply repeats.
Here's how it worked a long time ago. We had three main ways we would get news (aside from person to person). There was television. There was radio. And there were newspapers and news magazines.
On television, there would be a morning news program, an evening news program, and a late night news program. The evening news was the most important. Watching this would often be an important part of a family's daily schedule. Eat dinner and then watch the news. Or watch the news and then serve dinner. Or watch the news while eating dinner.
There were also weekly news magazines on television, such as "60 Minutes", that would cover only 2 or 3 stories a week (sometimes only 1) but go into it in much more depth than the regular evening news could.
Back in those days, radio was one of our major sources of music. Every hour they would break for a few minutes of news. So if something important happened throughout the day, people would find out about it without having to wait for the evening news on TV.
For more in depth coverage of major stories, and for coverage of a broader range of stories than we got from TV or radio there was the newspapers and the news magazines. Every city but the smallest had at least one daily newspaper. Some cities had two or even more.
A very large fraction of the population subscribed to a newspaper. Many papers published both a morning edition and an evening edition, so you could choose which you wanted. Some only offered one, but another paper offered the other. Whichever you had, it would be a fixed part of your daily ritual.
I liked morning editions. That way I could stumble out of bed, groggily go retrieve my paper from in front of my door, somehow make my way to the bathroom, and then while sitting on the john look at the front page. If nothing was there that shocked me out of my lingering slumber, I'd turn to the comics pages and read them. I might have another go at the front page over breakfast.
Then in the evening there would be some reasonably fixed time when I'd sit down and read the news, the few sports results I might care about, and the non-news material like movie reviews, fluff pieces, and maybe have a go at the crossword puzzle.
This was typical. Most of us had some kind of habit that involved in us spending quality time with our newspaper every day.
Many also subscribed to a weekly news magazine, such as Time, Newsweek, or US News and World Reports. Reading this was often one of our comforting ritual events. These magazines were not as timely as our newspapers, but could go into a lot more detail.
The key here is that a large fraction of the population had integrated ingesting news into their lives in a habitual, ritualistic way, and in a way that minimized distractions from other sources. Kids knew not to disturb Dad when he's reading his Sunday paper, or to keep the noise down when Walter Cronkite is on.
Comparing my recollection of those days to what I see now in others, and to how well I feel I am personally informed on the current events of our times, the impression I get as that we were better informed back then.
We have many more sources of news now, but we find stories from aggregators like Google News, or from link sharing sites like here and Reddit, or from what we see on Facebook and Twitter. The serious news by dedicated journalists we find through such means is mixed with links to poorly researched blogs and to sites that hide opinion as news.
When we do find ourselves reading good solid news, it is not part of some time we've set aside for getting the news. It is something we came across while entertaining ourselves, and we'll easily be distracted away in a few minutes.
When I first got my Kindle, I tried trial subscriptions to the Kindle editions of the Seattle Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and I set aside "news time" each day to read them. I noticed an interesting thing. In discussion forums I participated in, I generally felt that the other participants and I were about equally well informed on the current events issues that came up in the forums. However, once I started reading newspapers, and reading them regularly, it seemed obvious that I was better informed than my forum mates.
I let the trials expire, because there were enough features missing from all three papers (no comics, no crosswords, no pictures) that it just did not seem that the time was right for newspapers on Kindle at the price they wanted. I noticed that I quickly reverted to feeling like my forum mates knew as much as I did.
I'm not saying we should dump internet as a source of news. Just that being well informed might require more than treating solid high quality news as something that can be sprinkled in among our cat videos and clever tweets to be stumbled upon as we flitter our limited attention spans from one thing to another.
As I recall, in those golden days of the media past, there were numerous studies that showed, both for TV and radio, news consumption was negatively correlated with knowledge of current events.
> Comparing my recollection of those days to what I see now in others, and to how well I feel I am personally informed on the current events of our times, the impression I get as that we were better informed back then.
The impression I get is that people probably felt better informed back then. But probably weren't.
OTOH, because there were fewer, more standard vehicles, and they were very much integrated into peoples daily lives, the false impression of being informed that people had was probably strongly reinforced because what was being delivered (whether actually informative or not) was a lot more consistent person to person.
My search was cursory (I was just surprised by your claim and checked it), but (a) the results appears to point in the opposite direction to your claim and (b) sort of misses the point of the 'tzs parent comment.