Back in the bad old days of "traditional journalism", you could either let this kind of crap hit your perception filter or, failing that, find a real person responsible to go bash over the head.
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.
It's actually remarkably easy to filter it out. You're doing it right now by reading HN. Same with sub-reddits on reddit. The clickbait headlines either get re-written to better describe the actual content or are ignored altogether. Better than that you can typically skip visiting the actual piece itself and instead read the comments which are generally more interesting anyway.
They're not just hurting journalism, they're hurting readers. (Which is probably the same thing, of course). Crank every knob to 10. Compress music so it's louder. Everything is all sugar, all caffeine, all fizz. Blood, guts, and gore get regular new ways to crank the volume. Adult entertainment in 2015 is so extreme, a guy from 1970 might wonder if it was a psychology experiment. Media is consumed en masse, in parallel. Google loses revenue if it loads 0.2 seconds slower than the competition. We had to invent runes like TL;DR this past decade as a beacon of faith to the impatient. The word "this" has turned into a scam - "Insane new medical treatment for aging uses _this_", "New sorting algorithm magnitude increase with _this_ insane tweak" "If you don't know _this_ then you will fail in 2015". _this_, the magic box you have to stick your face into before you can see what everyone's looking at.
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?
Would this be better titled "Attention Grabbing Headlines Considered Harmful" ?
</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.)
Hah. I just realized "Considered Harmful" was clickbait in programming/tech communities long before we had "one weird trick" and listicles. I always hated that title, and wondered if the authors had even read the original.
Majority of journalism has been employing those tactics forever. Stupid, misinformed articles because you have to crank out copy to fill the page before the press starts clamping? Please, don't start to be self-righteous now.
I like comparing this idea to Ricky Gervais' movie "The Invention of Lying". To think about the first person to lie in a news headline... It's just hilarious.
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.
Hasn't this already happened? Who gets taken in by clickbait headlines any more? We all follow @savedyouaclick on Twitter to get the best bits, and ignore everything else.
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.
Different audiences. The Economist costs on Amazon $127/year, and $6.99 for a single issue when I pick up one at the airport.
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.
Which is sort of the point I was trying to get across.
Media is bifurcated. If people are sick of free click bait, they're welcome to pay cash, or with attention to ads. If companies can't make money on click bait after a time, they'll stop.
I've been a subscriber of The Economist for years now but I never heard of the other two. Are they comparable to the NY Review of Books in terms of article depth?
In the long run, I think these types of tactics undermine great journalists and writers everywhere and insult the intelligence of readers.
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).
Business Insider is not "journalism". It's clickbait, like Demand Media and AOL. The founder is one of the founders of DoubleClick. From Wikipedia: "CEO and Editor-In-Chief Henry Blodget is a Yale graduate who previously worked on Wall Street until he agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and payment of a $2 million fine and disgorgement of $2 million."
This is not journalism, but clickbaitism! All the tricks new "media" does today are just disgusting. Breaking things into pages to increase page views and stuff, stupid ads all over the place especially inline to make you click by mistake and so on. I don't mind pay walls if they have some sane model. Unfortunately, none of us have made a good-enough startup to give a better experience for those willing to pay. I don't mind paying $0.25 per good article, but I don't want to deal with any of the tricks - ads, suppressing outbound links, stupid carousels with a new pageview, etc. Give me a better experience and I will open my wallet for you! Otherwise, thanks, but no thanks!
One reason HN is worth a look once in a while - content is curated by an educated consumer community. Also headlines here provide at least some basic context (source, original year) to make a better guess whether a click is worth the risk of disappointment.
Are we reaching peak clickbait ?
Once this strategy's ROI goes down, I'm sure another morally void strategy will take its place.
And so the cycle of business churns endlessly.
I like the PT Barnum reference by aresant. Just more evidence to suggest history simply repeats.
Huffpo does that,but the other way around,just to make you click on the article again. it made me so angry I stopped reading that crap 4 years ago. I always knew it was just a glorified blog,not real news, but they had from time to time interesting articles or op ed. Today the quality is so low it's shameful. I just don't like being tricked ,it feels so insulting.
Business Insider's content isn't journalism. It's just like Buzzfeed, it's a content farm,it's marketing. Let's look at other articles from that author :
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.
Media outlets have resorted to insane headlines you won't believe are exaggerated for the same reason that record companies (and their pop stars like Lady Gaga, Nikki Minaj and Katy Perry) are constantly trying to out-costume and out-shock each other: it takes extreme measures to get anyone's attention in the age of the Internet and its vast, vast fields of entertainment.
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?
Today, I saw the following talk by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel-prize winning author, where he talks about the decline of culture (from his novel, The Civilization of Entertainment). English subtitles available.
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.”
I follow headlines from 70+ tech sites via RSS. I have no doubt in saying that Business Insider is the worst offender of all. BI is one of the few, who are consistent in their practice.
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.
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.
The author makes a valid point but I have a grater complaint. And maybe it's mostly me, never the less I feel that although professional journalists (studied journalism and got a job in journalism) are good writers, they lack rigor. That's to say they are quite good at relating the news, putting forth a story, but quite bad at analysis.
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....
Journalism is one of those areas where the net has been a two edged sword.
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 ...
> 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.
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.
I found studies showing that television in lieu of newspapers correlates negatively --- but that's a direct comparison between people who read the paper and watch news. The same studies showed little or no effect versus people that didn't consume the news at all.
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.
38 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadNow 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.
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?
</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.)
Cats that look like Celebrities
The Secrets of Top Programmers
Five Innovations killed by Venture Capitalists
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.
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).
I like the PT Barnum reference by aresant. Just more evidence to suggest history simply repeats.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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 ...
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.