Clickbait has become a common occurrence in our 21st century news environment. Clickbait, a well known mix of marketing and journalism has almost become an industry standard for those trying to maximize profits in mass media.
Clickbait may be more prominent than most expect. Clickbait, or Yellow Journalism, has been around since the nineteenth century. In the political cartoon The Evil Spirits of the Modern Day Press, written in 1888, the same concepts of today are seen. According to Gizmodo the cartoon highlights “paid puffery,” which is parallel to paid content; “Garbled News,” “personal journalism,” and “boasting lies.”
The term Yellow Journalism comes from a comic titled The Yellow Kid, which appeared in the New York World comic strip. At the time, during the nineteenth century, newspapers and mass media outlets were fighting for circulation numbers. Similar to today's environment, news outlets were fighting for viewership.
At the time, comics were one of the best ways to grab people's attention. Comics boosted viewership, which in turn meant more newspapers being sold, and more money being made. Gizmodo compares The Yellow Kid to today's Grumpy Cat. The Yellow Kid was a popular cartoon, and the reason people were buying papers, not for the news content held inside.
The term Yellow Journalism spawned from this comic, and became a blanket term when referring to profit driven journalism.
As time has moved on, the term has changed, but the principle has not.
Clickbait journalism has an emphasis on monetary motivation. As less and less people get their news from print journalism, the industry is shifting to a new frontier, online news. As people have pointed out, it’s hard to make consumers pay for something they previously haven’t had to. In the beginning, as news started to shift, and be offered in both print and web based mediums, news organizations weren’t keen to the need for online paywalls.
Now with an expectation of free news online, media outlets have to rely on ad driven revenue. Ad revenue has always played a role in the journalism industry but has taken on a new level of importance in the modern media scape.
Journalists understand that inorder to make money, and continue to stay afloat, they either need to hide their reporting behind paywalls, or take in revenue based on ad traffic. For known publications, paywalls may be an easier option when compared to less known news sources.
A consumer might be more inclined to pay for news coming from a trusted organization when compared to a lesser known publication. From a marketing standpoint, brand recognition plays a large role in news. Consumer trust is of the utmost importance.
However with the addition of analytics and consumer tracking, the world of journalism has an important decision to make. Do journalists write what consumers want to read, or do they write what they think consumers should read? Organizations know what people click, read, the time they spend engaged, the ads they click on, their path of navigation and more.
It is hard to have accessibility to these metrics and not use them in a for profit fashion. Before online news, in order to read a paper, you would have to buy it. Journalists would make money regardless of the likeability of content delivered.
Now, it is a race for clicks, engagement and SEO, (search engine optimization).
People define clickbait differently. Some refer to clickbait content as content they simply don’t like seeing on the internet, others see it as over promising and under delivering. Regardless of definition, clickbait works.
From the dawn of journalism, headlines, front pages, and layouts have hinged on engaging the reader. The principle is still the same, the medium has just changed.
According to Wired, there is behavioral science behind the effectiveness of clickbait. Drawing people in based on their emotional tendencies to respond to certain dilemas.
Playing off the emotional reactions to anger, fear, anxiety, humor and joy are a few of the top targeted emotions. By introducing these emotions journalists are simultaneously creating a call to action. The terms “hate-reading” or “hate-watching” are in direct response to headlines and titles that achieve this goal.
Wired reports that in a recent paper called "Breaking the News: First Impressions Matter On Online News," two researchers scanned 69,907 headlines produced by four international media outlets in 2014.
“After analyzing the sentiment polarity of these headlines (whether the primary emotion conveyed was positive, negative, or neutral), they found "an extreme sentiment score obtained the largest mean popularity." This not only suggests that strongly negative or strongly positive news tends to attract more readers, they concluded, but also that "a headline has more chance to [receive clicks] if the sentiment expressed in its text is extreme, towards the positive or the negative side." (Weird.com)
The second human reaction being capitalized on by clickbait is what is referred to as an “information gap.” An information gap plays to a reader's curiosity, making a reader want to connect the dots.
An example of an information gap headline would be something along the lines of, ‘You wouldn't believe what XYZ did to ABC’ or ‘do you know what's causing XYZ.’ These titles treat readers as if they don’t know, or can’t guess what the right answer is. Even if the title is somewhat obvious, people are still more likely to read an article to prove that they didn’t need the information to begin with.
Media outlets have been using tricks like these since the beginning, but only now are we being overwhelmed with clickbait titles that under deliver content. A catchy headline followed by solid writing and reporting are ethically grounded according to Ona Ethics but the problem arises when we are over promised in a headline, and underwhelmed in a story.
The ethical dilemmas of clickbait fall all over. Some of the biggest dilemmas we face with click bait are short term vs. long term, individual vs. community, truth vs. loyalty and right vs. wrong.
However, before getting into the ethical dilemmas we first need to look at the situations stakeholders. The biggest stakeholder would have to be readers. Journalists are here to serve the public. Journalists do not have a role to play as strictly entertainers. The second stakeholder, in terms of ethical dilemmas of clickbait, would be journalists themselves. Journalists are digging themselves a grave when it comes to public trust.
On the topic of public trust, short term vs. long term is overwhelmingly at play. News organizations rely heavily on trust between the reader and writer. If no one trusts what you’re writing, then the value of news plumits. The dilemma here is with more and more misleading and tricky headlines, people's trust for accuracy and delivery go down.
In the short term, news outlets need to capitalize and maximize people clicks, engagement and ad interactions. Publications need money. The problem with this is where the balance is struck. Arguably, a publication wouldn’t need clickbait headlines to turn profits if their reporting was at the highest level. In reality, with peoples shorter attention spans and less and less willingness to educate themselves, news media has to try and sucker readers in. While publications are trying to get their readers to read, they are simultaneously creating less and less trust between reader and writer.
By trying to make money in the short term, trust is being lost in the longer term. This will only lead to more problems down the road.
Individual vs. community is another dilemma the news media faces. In this situation the individual is mass media, and the community is readers. With all these analytics at organizations' fingertips, the problem of creating content based on what readers want to read vs what they should read is at play. Should readers be reading what news organizations think is important, or should writers be writing what they think will sell the best based on website metrics.
Another way of looking at the individual vs. community dilemma is from the point of view of the journalist. A journalist, as the individual, needs to make money, and clickbait is a great way of cashing in on clicks. However at the same time they are simultaneously threatening the greater community of journalists which operates heavily on community trust.
Truth vs. loyalty is yet another dilemma here. There has to be a balance between profits and accountability. Loyalty to a company might mean holding your tongue when editors write a clickbait headline. But at the same time, you have accountability to reporting the truth. Reporting truthly doesn’t include over promising headlines.
Another ethical dilemma attached to clickbait is right vs wrong. Put simply, is it right to use overly catchy headlines in order to attract readers? Or is that wrong?
There is also a clear breach in the SPJ code of ethics. Reporting the truth fully and accurately does not include false or misleading headlines. Clickbait also voids being transparent and accountable, another SPJ code of ethics.
The ethics of virtue and values as well as the ethics of rules, rights and duty can be used to analyze this situation.
Based on the ethics of virtue and value we can see that people must introspectively strike some sort of balance between being catchy enough to get clicks, and straight forward enough to provide what you say you will be delivering. There is an art to headline writing that does not involve misleading readers.
The ethics of rules, rights and duty are also applied by submerging journalists in the duty they have to the public, which is reporting the truth accurately and fairly. If a journalist is able to see their duty, then they are better able to refrain from creating clickbait titles.
The biggest SPJ guideline that journalists need to circle back to is transparency. Journalists aren’t advertisers, marketers or manipulators, they are journalists. Journalists need to be transparent in their reporting inorder to maintain trust with the public, creating misleading headlines does not achieve this goal.
Now how do we solve this problem? Well I think there are a couple of ways to go about this. First off, I think there is an overarching problem which is creating the need for clickbait to begin with. I think this problem stems from A, people's media literacy, and B, people's lack of care when it comes to news.
Media literacy seems to be a pretty common term in today's day in age as the internet has become a part of everyone's daily life, but what is media literacy? Where do people learn these skills?
Being media literate is the ability to reason fact vs fiction, see bias, and over all be able to judge the credibility of stuff online. Now arguably, younger generations are going to be better at making these judgments as they’ve grown up in the current media scape. However, I think younger generations are generally losing interest in news.
I think one of the best ways to combat clickbait is by incentivising real news. In my personal experience there was a huge lack of anything journalism related in my public education. I think if we were to teach journalism and the importance of news from a young age we would have a higher percentage of citizens fulfilling their civic duties.
As an American, and as a citizen of democracy, it is our right and duty to educate ourselves on the happenings of the world. Why vote for something you don’t understand? I think if we started to push this ideology at an earlier age we would have a more involved population.
By having a more involved population we would be able to move past clickbait, as the content of stories will start to regain traction over catchy titles.
I also understand that for a larger portion of older generations, the internet can be more of a tricky place than it should be. Not to be cynical, but I don’t think there is much hope for non native media users. It’s not like we can create a mandatory media literacy course for those who don’t understand the wicked ways of marketers.
The dilemma here is that the same generations that don’t understand the internet are the generations that have more of a connection to news media. By clickbaiting them, they are losing trust in journalism, and simultaneously teaching younger generations that clickbait, and profit journalism is the norm.
Journalism is the 4th branch of checks and balances, and in some sense the body that holds the government responsible. We are extremely important to a functioning democracy and more people need to understand that.
I think instead of trying to teach everyone how to be successful on the internet we need to double down on teaching future generations the importance of being a civically engaged citizen. It is crucial that people understand what is happening, if they don’t, we fall one step closer to a dictatorship. By pushing fake headlines and misleading information we are destroying the reason we are here in the first place.
Annotated Bio:
Frampton, Ben. “Clickbait: The Changing Face of Online Journalism.” BBC News, 14 Sept. 2015, www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-34213693.
This is a solid breakdown of some of the good, the bad, and the inbetween when it comes to “clickbait” in journalism. Ken Smith, chairman of the Welsh executive council of the National Union of Jounrlaists voices his concerns in regard to only following analytics. He’s basically saying that if news outlets just produce what people want to hear then they aren’t really hitting the marks of journalism. The inbetween is sort of that headline writing is considered an art, but there is a difference between a good headline and click bait.
“A Short History of ‘click-Bait’ Journalism.” Al Jazeera Media Institute, 26 July 2022, institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/1943.
This article provides a brief history of ‘Yellow Journalism’ a term which refers to attention grabbing headlines in print journalism in the 1800’s, and more of a breakdown on clickbait and the positive feedback loop social media creates in regard to clickbait titles. Once you click one, it thinks that's what you want. It also talks further on how social media is actually working against journalists, kind of an interesting view point with solid reasoning.
“Broken and Distrusting: Why Americans Are Pulling Away from the Daily News.” The Guardian, 17 July 2022, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/16/americans-avoid-news-reuters-survey.
This article talks about a study Reuters Institute did on Americans and citizens of some other countries on the recession of news viewership. Although the article doesn’t talk directly about clickbait it does provides some data that can be anaylized, and used to draw connections between the need for clickbait, as news outlets need people to look at their stuff, but how at the same time it might be more damaging in the long run.
University, Stanford. “What This Stanford Scholar Learned about Clickbait Will Surprise You.” Stanford News, 21 Mar. 2018, news.stanford.edu/2018/03/21/this-stanford-scholar-learned-clickbait-will-surprise/.
This article from Stanford talks about the implications of Data driven journalism. This seems to be a recurring subject in a lot of these articles. I think it comes up so much due to the massive ethical dilemma it raises, basically quality over quantity. It explorers the possible dangers of data journalism, where we are being reactive instead of active to our audiences.
Gardiner, Bryan. “You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline.” Wired, 18 Dec. 2015, www.wired.com/2015/12/psychology-of-clickbait/.
This article talks about some of the behavioral science behind the effectiveness of click bait. It’s quite interesting. From my brief skim the article highlights how our emotions, and the power they subconsciously have, play a huge roll in clickbait, and how it affects readers, even if they know they are clicking a clickbait title.
“Clickbait and Metrics.” ONA Ethics, ethics.journalists.org/topics/clickbait-and-metrics/. Accessed 30 May 2023.
This article describes the ethics behind clickbait and the ethics of headline writing. The article points out the difference between what is good headline writing, and ethically grounded, vs clickbait titles, and how the ethics of misleading titles play out. I agree with the points made in the article.
Newitz, Annalee. “A History of Clickbait: The First 100 Years.” Gizmodo, 25 Feb. 2014, gizmodo.com/a-history-of-clickbait-the-first-100-years-1530683235.
This article provides more background on the origins of clickbait. It also talks about the term yellow journalism and where that comes from. This article provided me with context to be able to write on the history of Clickbait. I found this article to be quite interesting.
“U.S. Diplomacy and Yellow Journalism, 1895-1898.” U.S. Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism. Accessed 30 May 2023.
This article further describes the term Yellow Journalism and details the political role it played in the late 1800’s. Again, this article helped me form the history of clickbait and profit driven journalism. This article was a little bit confusing but had some good information.
(https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism)
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