Have you recently been stung by a click bait news article? It happens to all of us, one minute you’re innocently trying to zoom in on that attractive lady’s profile picture, to better appreciate it having just noticed it in thumbnail view on a comment thread, the next minute you’re taken on a whirlwind thrill ride of equal amounts of frustration and apathy, unable to escape the endless cycle of things you ‘must see’. Especially ‘picture 7’, which, believe me now, will blow your mind. You click the ‘X’ to close the tab, and before you know it, you’ve either won a life changing sum of money or your device is being held to ransom by the Lizard Squad for some bits of coins apparently? It’s a murky world out there online, and some of these sites even dress up their revenue generating schemes as ‘news’. Can you imagine?
A non news entity masquerading as a news webpage. Believe me, it happens…. It truly is the end of days.
Anyway, here at Bullshire Online, us journalists have put together a handy list of features to enable you to tell the difference between clickbait and a genuine news article. Ask yourself the following questions. Has the web page copied and pasted a ‘news story’ from a reputable source such as an official agency, and then split it across several pages? Has the web page got a feature requiring you to ‘answer this question’ to read the article? Has it got adverts for get rich quick schemes after every paragraph? Prior to any 20 second video clip loading do you have to watch a 3 minute advert extolling the virtues of a particular brand?
Did the headline not in fact state impartial facts but ask an inflammatory question or invite comment to boost page interactions? If this is the case, congratulations, you have found a genuine news article. You see, many years ago now, us journalists discovered that rather than interviewing people and breaking stories of national importance, it was far simpler to wait until the police released a statement on facebook, and copy the entire thing and any video footage, and plaster it with adverts .
I think we’ve gotten away with it so far, and now we’ll even write adverts and post them in with our clickbaited news. Marvellous. Hopefully we won’t have to go back to being real journalists ever again, submitting all those FOI requests and sitting in a bar all day drinking, whilst filming an off duty policeman drinking in the bar opposite was quite hard work.