TL;DR, longing for clickbaits

Today morning Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland, published a story in their paper with a raise on the first page: “Support keeps fjords inhabited” (orig. Tuki pitää vuonot asuttuina). The title of the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) article was “The whole country populated at any cost” (orig. Koko maa asuttuna, maksoi mitä maksoi).

Internet slang has had a word for too long articles since 2003. The Oxford Dictionaries Online adopted the word in 2013. The TL;DR is quickly turning to a phenomenon also for the long-form journalism, where the journalists write a small abstract about their article.

All the Nordic countries struggle with the same problem. Should we keep the whole country inhabited? Why should we? How much does it cost to bring equal services to everyone? This surely should interest the potential readers.

On the internet, the title was “The paradise of the North” and the article was seasoned with beautiful pictures from the Norwegian coastline. It admired the life of a couple who bought a farm from Lyngen in northern Norway and got support from the government.

This article was one of the long read articles Helsingin Sanomat publishes. The article was objective, which is one of the most important pillars in journalism. Most of the articles on the internet today seems to fall into the garbage category rather than being objective. This is the so-called clickbait journalism. Clickbait headlines were discovered globally in 2014.

The long-form articles are time-consuming and costly for the media companies, where with a good clickbait, you can get a good revenue of online ad-marketing. Also, the media companies measure the most clicked articles and give honour to journalists whose articles are the most read ones.

In social media, when we like, share or comment, our brain releases dopamine, which is also known as the reward chemical. Clickbaits serves this, when we tend to think, there will be something valuable behind the daring headline. After all, these articles rarely have any other goal than to entertain us. The informative role, that journalism itself has, is lost right here.

Clickbaits feeds our emotional needs, where long-read articles support the deep-thinking. In the previous years, the media companies have even predicted the death of long-form journalism. According to Guardian [1], it’s evolving rather than dying. The articles have been the inspiration for journalism expanding into podcasts, TV shows and even films.

As one of the most influential countries is led by a mannequin of fake news (freshly exaggerating about forestry in Finland [2]) I still want to believe in the future of journalism. I was so sorry the see the title of the Helsingin Sanomat article changed in the evening to “Move countryside and get rich” (Muuta maalle ja vaurastu).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/10/hollywood-film-long-reads-journalism

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/19/make-america-rake-again-finland-trump-forest-fire