Typical pattern: “Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it’s not good!”
This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it’s in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don’t even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.
Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn’t to get you to buy anything yet, it’s just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It’s a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what “headline” even means.
Yeah I made c/savedyouaclick in the hope of getting people de-clickbaiting stories, but I was the only poster afaict. I wonder if calling it newssummararies could help.
Oh I’d be up to help if I could
Maybe a link or two a day
It could be worth posting about it in !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world
While we’re at it, does anyone on Lemmy hate capitalism? I never see anyone mention it.
And that Trump guy is really not turning out well.
I don’t click those any more. I assume they’re completely written by AI and not fact-checked in any way. They just suck knowledge out of me instead of adding more.
There’s something I hate more than clickbaity headlines, click here to find out!!
Whenever people ask this question, I do this one thing.
NPR and the BBC still aren’t doing that.
- I think the Associated Press is in the clear here.
- Seems Reuters so far is good too.
- And The Guardian
- Mother Jones
- ProPublica
- Ars Technica for tech news
- The Conversation (always written by subject-matter experts)
- Deutsche Welle
- Etc.
Thankfully there are still a lot of amazing news sources that have held onto their integrity. Click here to see even more. Number 17 will surprise you!
That’s a very good list. I just threw out the first couple that came to mind, but it is worth calling out the organizations that are still trying to do real journalism.
I give small sustaining donations to NPR, ProPublica, and The Guardian. I hope to add a few more when I can.
“news headlines” should be “opinion headlines”. I’m going back to Jack Webb from Dragnet…“Just the facts, ma’am.”.
I miss objective news in general
Everything has a spin on it, even if it’s subtle
Profit above all. Been this way for a long long time.
You won’t believe what this person thinks of our headlines
It’s the news that Starship Troopers and Idiocracy both parodied. Except it’s not future fantasy, it’s real and here now.
Predominantly? Seems to be 100% and many times they are contradicted by the article. At this point I assume a fear headline is overblown bullshit. Also health headlines are always the same crap repeated over and over.
which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads.
I don’t understand why businesses waste their money on buying these garbage ads. Pissing away their ad dollars.
I’m less annoyed if its technically true and I get to sharpen my media crit skills by making that evaluation after the fact
I despise it. It’s everywhere.
It’s even like that in our public service media in my country, which is tax-funded and does not need to generate clicks at all. There are no ads embedded in their articles or anything. They have no reason at all to bait.
Yet they do. It’s like it’s getting taught at journalism school or wherever the fuck they go before starting their career in baiting.
Master baiters are what they are. Absolute masters.
Newspapers used to be displayed in boxes, and available for sale almost vending machine-style.
I imagine headlines were “buy-bait” back then. But maybe they weren’t quite as good at it, since it hadn’t been studied as much?
