In today's digital age, it's a race to snap up readers' attention and an even bigger one to maintain it.
This article touches on how clickbait has slowly shaped journalism to be the sensationalised one-liners it portrays today. However, instead of completely bashing the clickbait trend, the interviewees featured share their side of the story on how clickbait can offer new ways of delivering content. Each of them are specialised in their own field of journalism and hold respected positions.
Damian Radcliffe, honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Journalism said: "It's part of the world in which we now operate - there's a lot to be said for journalists to be able to write better or snappier headlines."
Headline writing has long been considered a skill-- and in my opinion, the emergence of clickbait isn't necesarrily a bad thing. Like how people grow old, we will all eventually run out of content one day. What's important is how we package, deliver and market it in a way that's appealing yet a satisfying outcome for fellow readers. In staggered doses, it could prove to be unbelievably helpful.
Link - https://www.socialmediatoday.com/smt-influencer/social-media-scourge-2016-rise-and-hopefully-fall-click-bait
Social media today takes a stand on the trend of clickbait. In the world of social media, they feel that clickbait has swallowed everything-- from political campaigns, banking news, celebrity scandals, leisure news, and many more. In 2016 saw the high rise of clickbait taking over, and news publications did experience a significant drop of reads in their usual traffic. It didnt take much to create intellectual, factual content with reliable stats. Trashy, simple content writing was a lot cheaper and easier to produce, yet those rose to fame in the height of 2016.
Now 2017, Facebook is taking an effort to ban clickbait items by tweaking their algorithms here and there.
I agree that clickbait has indeed taken over the social media culture and is in danger of being a permanent label for modern journalism. This may deter people to click and even spread misleading news. It hasn't escalated into fake news yet, but with the lack of supervision, that time is bound to come. But the good news is that Facebook and Google is taking effort to reduce the amount of fluff, and soon hopefully we can go back to reliable and stable content.
Link - http://theconversation.com/four-reasons-why-listicles-and-clickbait-are-killing-real-journalism-67406
The listicle is another editorial phenomenon. It works similarly, throwing out easy information and capitalising on their assumptions audiences want quick bits of information. Listicles and clickbait show how this is creating a shift in journalism-- people are now more used to digesting tiny bits of info, instead of reading through slowly with an inept understanding. They both also have the same thing in common, which is how their 'content' are more or less facts pulled from the Internet and jumbled together to create an article which is mostly assumed on.
Editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Kathrine Viner, has written that “chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy … undermines the value of journalism”.
And i find i agree with her. Publications now race to put together the most sensationalised piece they can think up, and their main priority is no longer fact-checking once, or twice. The one with the most power words wins, and leads to more listicles, more poorly-slapped together content, and all of it undermines the value of news.
Soon everyone will be taking news at face value just because 'someone told me, so it must be true' and that is a very dangerous path for journalism to take.
Link- https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/70fip5/how_clickbait_journalism_is_destroying_social/
This sub-reddit takes seriously the negative consequences of clickbait and how it may change your thinking as a whole. Therefore they have listed down a few reasons of why clickbait is dangerous and why you should avoid it. Inclusive with a few necessary precautions for you to take if you do not want to be affected.
Most of them touch on how clickbait approach your brain chemicals and induce them to create dopamine. It sparks curousity and each time this happens and you give in to it, it slowly becomes a habit. Over time, the brain will become addicted to these clickbait headlines and we won't even think twice before clicking on it. They somehow achieve this by feeling on our emotional needs, instead of intellectual deep-thoughts. As you continue reading these type of clickbait, you no longer feel any need for intelligent stimuli. Long story short, it makes you dumber.
I think this forum makes very good points on why clickbait is discouraged. It makes the reader more aware of what they read and will be more prone to think before clicking-- something everyone should practice. As users of social media, it should be our responsibility to filter out misleading and fake news out of our newsfeed. We don't want to live in a world where we can't trust what we read.
This gives journalists to reshape journalism back to its original focus-- to inform and deliver reliable news and to be a source that the people can trust.
Link - http://www.statepress.com/article/2016/10/spopinion-critique-of-modern-media
They gave examples of clickbait in all media-- article and video.
This shows how clickbait is creating the culture of readers to comment even before they read. Becoming an increasingly dangerous practice, as people tend to assume one-off from the article before even opening it.
Milton Coleman, Edith Kinney Gaylord visiting professor in journalism ethics, said the purpose of a headline is to be an accurate summary of a story. He believes that if a journalist can’t attract an audience with the facts, they shouldn’t write the story at all.
“What kind of journalist are you? How far will you stretch the basic principles?" Coleman said. "The basic principle is the headline should be an accurate reflection of the story.”
This type of journalism has caused to breed an audience that is unable to distinguish satire or clickbait from real news. Another reason of why clickbait should be opposed in journalism before journalism loses its meaning completely.
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