This One Trick Will Make Anyone Click On Any Headline

In the race to the bottom, even blue-chip newspapers have started to use this trick in a desperate attempt to get users to click on their stories. Never mind the content of the story, or whether the reader actually reads the story. As long as the visitor clicks on the page, it counts as a valid impression for advertisement dollars.

Coming up with novel and catchy headlines has always been an art in of itself. Many tabloids and serious newspapers have distinguished themselves by managing to condense entire stories and ranges of emotion into a single sentence. Small wonder then that writing headlines garners its own international awards, and that editors reserve the right to choose the headlines regardless of the poor contributing authors’ wishes or the passions of the journalist who actually wrote the story.

But this is a new low in journalism.

That the tactic normally used to peddle weight-loss products, work-from-home scams, and fairness schemes has somehow migrated into the journalistic mainstream just shows how close to rock bottom journalism has descended. Gone are the days when you imagined the paperboy screaming out the headline followed by a “read all about it!”

It seems reporters are so scared of their online readers’ attention deficit that they’ve convinced themselves (perhaps rightly so) that readers don’t want to read all about it; they simply want to know who it was or what happened and then move on with their lives.

The headline that perfectly captures the story has thus become its greatest enemy. If you could summarize a story into a single headline why bother reading what comes under it? Why bother clicking on it to read the mundane circumstances and probably poor analysis of what happened. You told us this happened. Thanks, we want to move on to the next 140-character tidbit.

Perhaps that is a little too harsh.

The savvy digital innovation person inside the media house will point out that for a new public used to consuming extremely bite-sized information pieces, led no doubt by the Twittering and micro-blogging of the world, this is the only tactic left to get people to click through and see the story, if not actually read it. One can imagine them trying to come up with quotas: while we wish all our headlines could have this, we must limit it to only 10–20 percent of headlines shown at a time, or perhaps one in ten displayed on the screen. One can further imagine a fight between editors and journalists over who gets to use this trick on their headline.

But where does this stop?

At some point people will become wary of the click-bait and resentful of having to click through to find a singular word that should have rightly been in the headline itself. After all, there are many cases in which people are satisfied just knowing something happened rather than wanting to actually click and read the details.

Will this get worse before it gets better?

Possible front-page listing on a mobile news site:

“This city was bombed by terrorists yesterday.”

“Nation mourns as this man was assassinated”

“Evacuate this area immediately due to forest fires”

I can only hope that this trick dies a quick death. If publications do go down, they should at least do so with some of their dignity intact.