There's a whole industry on the net of pimping "fear porn." Sometimes the fears are even complete fiction, like Fukushima causing a cancer epidemic on the US West Coast. These sites are click farms, and some of them make a lot of money by doing nothing more than aggregating and reprinting blog articles with a fear or outrage slant. They generate massive traffic in spite of their horrible quality.
"If it bleeds it leads" is a saying because it absolutely works. There seems to be a huge attention bias toward negative information.
My father was telling me about how everyone was worried about Halloween candy containing marijuana now that it is legal in some states. Well, I looked up more information and it turns out there were no reports that any child actually received candy with marijuana in it. It was just a news story created upon the worry of some imagined scenario.
Is it possible that the world we live in is so nice that almost all of the out-of-the-ordinary things that happen are bad things? People still cheer on news like the Philae landing, but highway overpasses being completed on time is the very incarnation of met expectations.
People don't rubberneck an open road because there's nothing human happening there. People certainly rubberneck when wedding processionals go past. Parades are another example.
This result (fewer readers for 'good news') isn't particularly surprising. People read the news to find things they need to take action on, things that interrupt their normal life flow and tell them what to do. I read a paper that called it the Utopia Paradox[1] which described the situation where all needs are met, people cease to pursue ideas. I would find when starting a new job and leaving behind an email inbox full of demands on my time that the sheer choice of things to do is initially overwhelming.
So when you stop giving people things to worry about, and I think they use it as a crutch to organize their day, they are at a loss. Too often news is "Its going to rain" therefore I need to have my raincoat tomorrow, "Idiots are going to win the election", therefore I need to vote, "Kids are getting kidnapped", therefore I need to protect my kids. But when the news is, "All the trains are on time!" what help does that give you in planning your life? None. And in fact you have now "wasted" time on reading an article that hasn't helped you figure out anything you need to prepare for or worry about, so that are only so many more minutes left in the day to prepare.
It's a very strange cycle. You can play it the other way though, you can both report good news and give planning data, like "The trains are all on time and cars are less reliable than they were, consider changing your plan to use the train tomorrow." That is the sort of positive news I'd prefer we got, "Here is what is going on and here is some action you can take to help it continue and/or mitigate it."
[1] I suspect there are several alternate uses of this name though.
Nice analysis. The last paragraph has an interesting idea worth pursuing.
However, all those who seek and read negative news may not be craving for action. I think it is more of a craving for interesting things or shocking things which "jolt" the brain.
I don't think we even need to combine the good and bad news in the way you describe (although clumping related news together is certainly good). The key to useful news seems to be that something changed. For example, trains are on time may not be useful, but train accuracy improved is.
Good point. The "good news" cited in the short article weren't really news were they? They were more statement of facts. The roads remained open. The trains remained on time. That's not new.
Could be a combination of bad reporting (due to reporters/writers not used to good news), and the points made by the grandparent post.
I can't recall a single time, ever, that the news gave me actionable information that I didn't already get from other sources. Basically, when you subtract all the feel-good stories and all the scare stories, what is left is the weather, information that affects my commute and extraordinary events. The weather i get from looking out the window in the morning. If something affects my commute i have to try to make it anyway, so knowing ahead of time just gives me more stress. And extraordinary events will be told to me in other ways.
Taking your examples: (1) nobody should need to tell you to protect your kids, (2) you should always vote, (3) you can see whether you need a raincoat in the morning.
Basically, the actionable content of the news is exactly zero. When i watch it, i don't expect to take action, i expect to be informed about the zeitgeist so i can gossip along with everybody else. We like to gossip about bad things more than good things, so if the news tells us only good things, it's not giving us what we want.
Not sure how you are going to find out the tornado weather in Chicago by looking out your window in New York, prior to flying out. Or how you are going to find out about a major traffic blockage on your commute route by looking at the traffic in your street.
Or even more extreme, how your are going to ask your nurse daughter to take extra precautions because there is a serial rapist of nurses in your city, without listening to any news.
Almost by definition, news is something out of the ordinary. I would suspect that news plays a far bigger role in your life than you seem to want to admit.
It is also possible that by emphasizing negative news they have built an audience that is seeking negative news and it may be an entirely different audience who wants to read the positive stuff. Spend one day on positive news, they lose their core audience without having a chance to reach people who are truly interested in positive news.
It's kind of ironic actually - they follow up a day of purely good news with perhaps the most depressing news of all: human beings are hardwired for negativity :)
and brings nothing to the debate but distraction. Who cares if it was 1/10th or 6/10ths, the point remains the same. In fact if anything the headline understates the point by using decimate.
They certainly biased their own readership by announcing the editorial agenda ahead of time. It would have been far more interesting to do this unannounced and then inspect the results. Given how nearly universally conditioned the general population is towards "negative" news people probably just took this to mean no "real" news would be published that day.
Their readership might not enjoy 'good news', if you build up readers who enjoy a negative story, then putting 'good news' may put people off.
For example, I actually come to HN because in general there are 'happier' or at least less depressing stories on HN than negative. If all of the sudden this changed, I probably would visit it significantly less.
Plus, I would like to point out that Russian's (or any society for that matter), may have react different to happy stories.
> For example, I actually come to HN because in general there are 'happier' or at least less depressing stories on HN than negative. If all of the sudden this changed, I probably would visit it significantly less.
Same here. I actively avoid reading the local and world news. I didn't even know about the Ferguson case until starting talking to me about it. I assume that if there's something really important happening in the world that I need to know about, I'll either see it on Facebook or hear about it from a family member.
I love interesting articles about math, science, technology, music, and other thought-provoking ideas though. That's why I visit HN.
Besides, if there is something really important going on, it will show up on HN too. We just filter out all the day to day negative noise that fills the mainstream news.
Something that popped into my head while reading this.
I am curious if the result would be different in a country other than Russia. In particular any country that doesn't have a recent history of heavy handed censorship and oppression.
>"No disruption on the roads despite snow,"
>an underpass would be built in time for Victory Day.
These seem eerily like the kind of headlines you would get in an environment where newspapers are forbidden from commenting on negative events. I wonder whether Russia's recent history makes people more averse to this kind of reporting than might be the case elsewhere.
I think this is less some grand psychological revelation about the human race and more a simple failure of the newspaper. Those weren't good news, those simply weren't news at all.
I don't know the original articles, but if the headlines in the BBC story are in any kind representative, then I have my doubts that the failure of the whole operation was really because people only want to read bad news.
For a basic definition of "news item", I would require that it tells me something I don't already know - or at least don't assume is the norm. Stuff like "you can use the public road system to commute to work today" or "municipal construction project is still on time as of today" does not fit that definition. (Okay, maybe the last one kinda does)
I think in general it is possible to make "sellable" headlines from good news as long as they are in some way actually relevant for the reader: Everyone would like to be informed about some new tax laws that allow them to save money. The HN frontpage itself also frequently contains new, positive developments from tech or science the top ranks.
27 comments
[ 9.9 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] thread"If it bleeds it leads" is a saying because it absolutely works. There seems to be a huge attention bias toward negative information.
Is it possible that the world we live in is so nice that almost all of the out-of-the-ordinary things that happen are bad things? People still cheer on news like the Philae landing, but highway overpasses being completed on time is the very incarnation of met expectations.
So when you stop giving people things to worry about, and I think they use it as a crutch to organize their day, they are at a loss. Too often news is "Its going to rain" therefore I need to have my raincoat tomorrow, "Idiots are going to win the election", therefore I need to vote, "Kids are getting kidnapped", therefore I need to protect my kids. But when the news is, "All the trains are on time!" what help does that give you in planning your life? None. And in fact you have now "wasted" time on reading an article that hasn't helped you figure out anything you need to prepare for or worry about, so that are only so many more minutes left in the day to prepare.
It's a very strange cycle. You can play it the other way though, you can both report good news and give planning data, like "The trains are all on time and cars are less reliable than they were, consider changing your plan to use the train tomorrow." That is the sort of positive news I'd prefer we got, "Here is what is going on and here is some action you can take to help it continue and/or mitigate it."
[1] I suspect there are several alternate uses of this name though.
However, all those who seek and read negative news may not be craving for action. I think it is more of a craving for interesting things or shocking things which "jolt" the brain.
Could be a combination of bad reporting (due to reporters/writers not used to good news), and the points made by the grandparent post.
Taking your examples: (1) nobody should need to tell you to protect your kids, (2) you should always vote, (3) you can see whether you need a raincoat in the morning.
Basically, the actionable content of the news is exactly zero. When i watch it, i don't expect to take action, i expect to be informed about the zeitgeist so i can gossip along with everybody else. We like to gossip about bad things more than good things, so if the news tells us only good things, it's not giving us what we want.
Or even more extreme, how your are going to ask your nurse daughter to take extra precautions because there is a serial rapist of nurses in your city, without listening to any news.
Almost by definition, news is something out of the ordinary. I would suspect that news plays a far bigger role in your life than you seem to want to admit.
The headline writer ought to look up the definition of decimate.
> ˈdesəˌmāt/
> verb
> verb: decimate; 3rd person present: decimates; past tense: decimated; past participle: > decimated; gerund or present participle: decimating
> 1.
> kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of.
...
Yes, the root of the word is "1 in 10". However, that is not the modern meaning of the word.
Etymology is not the same as the dictionary definition of a word. Nor is its historical use in the far past.
People would be surprised for example to learn that the lemma for "literally" in the dictionary also contains this definition:
"in effect": virtually (will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins)
(From Merriam-Webster)
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/09/does-decimate-mea...
For example, I actually come to HN because in general there are 'happier' or at least less depressing stories on HN than negative. If all of the sudden this changed, I probably would visit it significantly less.
Plus, I would like to point out that Russian's (or any society for that matter), may have react different to happy stories.
Same here. I actively avoid reading the local and world news. I didn't even know about the Ferguson case until starting talking to me about it. I assume that if there's something really important happening in the world that I need to know about, I'll either see it on Facebook or hear about it from a family member.
I love interesting articles about math, science, technology, music, and other thought-provoking ideas though. That's why I visit HN.
I am curious if the result would be different in a country other than Russia. In particular any country that doesn't have a recent history of heavy handed censorship and oppression.
>"No disruption on the roads despite snow,"
>an underpass would be built in time for Victory Day.
These seem eerily like the kind of headlines you would get in an environment where newspapers are forbidden from commenting on negative events. I wonder whether Russia's recent history makes people more averse to this kind of reporting than might be the case elsewhere.
I don't know the original articles, but if the headlines in the BBC story are in any kind representative, then I have my doubts that the failure of the whole operation was really because people only want to read bad news.
For a basic definition of "news item", I would require that it tells me something I don't already know - or at least don't assume is the norm. Stuff like "you can use the public road system to commute to work today" or "municipal construction project is still on time as of today" does not fit that definition. (Okay, maybe the last one kinda does)
I think in general it is possible to make "sellable" headlines from good news as long as they are in some way actually relevant for the reader: Everyone would like to be informed about some new tax laws that allow them to save money. The HN frontpage itself also frequently contains new, positive developments from tech or science the top ranks.