
Attention Grabbing Headlines Are Hurting Journalism - Dickinson12
http://reesekyler.posthaven.com/attention-grabbing-headlines
======
digitalsushi
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?

~~~
glomph
Old man shakes first at cloud.

------
aresant
Two things:

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.

~~~
spitfire
Then how, exactly, do The Economist, Laphams quarterly and Monocle stay in
business?

~~~
res0nat0r
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.

~~~
spitfire
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 prefer simple cash myself.

------
aikah
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 :

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/author/james-
cook](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.

------
Animats
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."

------
personlurking
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.

19 minutes
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWDgjPjp1S8](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.”

------
nandreev
8 Reasons Why Attention Grabbing Headlines are Ruining Society... and Why We
Need Them More Than Ever

~~~
mdanger007
You Might Also Like:

Cats that look like Celebrities

The Secrets of Top Programmers

Five Innovations killed by Venture Capitalists

~~~
bhayden
I would click all three of those.

------
mc32
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....

Alas, it seems I'm expecting too much.

------
fivedogit
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?

------
lfowles
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.)

~~~
ioddly
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.

------
petercooper
_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).

------
busterarm
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.

~~~
dageshi
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.

------
kolev
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!

------
_cudgel
Here's a thought:

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.

~~~
sharkweek
>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.

------
MollyR
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.

------
heisenbit
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.

------
webwanderings
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.

------
ape4
Maybe news sites can have multiple headlines? Sane/sensible when you are
already on the site and click bait to get people to the site.

~~~
aikah
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.

------
tzs
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 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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

------
blumkvist
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.

~~~
cortesoft
Seriously... have people not heard of Yellow Journalism?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)

