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Typo Today Does clickbait ruin the news media? - Typo Today

Does clickbait ruin the news media?

Brian Penny

Does clickbait ruin the news media?

Journalism vs PR, SEO, and Content Marketing

I’m a gonzo journalist and content marketer, so you’re right in my wheelhouse discussing clickbait. First, some credentials. Here’s my Muck Rack account:https://muckrack.com/brian-penny/articles

Muck Rack is one of many tools used by the media to connect with each other and potential sources.

I also wrote a satirical article for Cracked (owned by Scripps) that dives deeper into how content marketing seeps into media reviews.https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2507-how-i-used-fake-reviews-tons-free-crap.html

In it, I explain how the circuit works behind every product, game, movie, TV show, and any other reviews in major news outlets.

Journalists are told to return items by their publishers, but it’s not uncommon for them to keep them anyway. They don’t make enough to have that much integrity, and it blends into influencer marketing on social media.

In fact, you find the same things in both mainstream media and social media: clickbait, sponsored posts, media hype, etc.

By “clickbait ads,” I assume you mean the clearly sponsored posts that appear next to a story like mine in your news feed versus the sponsored display advertisements.

Display advertisements like pop up ads are like ad pages in a physical newspaper or magazine. The typical physical newspaper is about 50/50 ads to stories, although that’s deceiving, because editorials are also mixed in with investigative journalism.

On Quora, that is equivalent to the sponsored answers I come across while trying to find something interesting to read versus the ad that shows at the bottom of the screen that I don’t get paid for.

Those are the posts the publisher actually gets paid by a brand directly to post. But that’s not the only way businesses and people pay to be featured in the news.

Content marketing is the other side of this, which makes the editorial section the most sought after section of the newspaper over the ads. People pay to get featured on the news, and there’s the entire PR and content marketing industry being fueled by this money.

That’s clickbait, but it’s just one piece of an overall larger situation. There’s some pretty good Hollywood media that depicts the problem with news media that could use some context and updates.

One of my favorite scenes from HBO and Aaron Sorkin was the first scene in The Newsroom.

The gist of this speech from Jeff Daniels in 2012 is that the media was once a great institution that’s been ruined by advertising. He plays a veteran broadcast journalist who is disillusioned and suddenly spitting out truth bombs.

There’s a tinge of truth to the highly produced piece that essentially turns 1978’s Network into a TV series. That movie also has a classic scene with commentary on the news.

In this scene, veteran news anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) goes on an angry rant on live TV after learning he’s going to be fired. 

His impassioned speech gets massive ratings, and his career is transformed by it, similar to Brockmire.

Both scenes are meant to point out the ongoing problems with commercialized media, and it is not one that’s easy to fix.

The entirety of national news starts with local news. Stories like the Epstein scandal or the Iran Contra scandal all started with local journalists.

John Oliver has a lot of great shows highlighting the problem you’re getting at while exploring the importance of local news.

Problems with Clickbait and Sponsored Content

That means local news is the best way for me to illustrate this.

When I was a kid, I delivered newspapers for my local newspaper. The newspaper was owned by a family-owned business called Wick Communications. 

Francis Wick on the left is now the CEO, and I went to high school with him. The company his father left him owns 27 local newspapers and 18 specialty publications in 11 states.

To make this happen, the company centralized as much operations as possible at headquarters and ran small satellite offices for small town journalists.

And this family business is a small fish competing against whales and sharks who clickbait you. Mainstream media is largely centralized, but the internet changed the game in a lot of ways.

If you want national news, you can find it so much easier for free now than ever before. Before the internet, not only did it cost a lot to publish everything, but it also was a lot slower to get information out. If anything, that made clickbait worse (although you didn’t click back then – you bought).

Now we can see what’s happening everywhere, but it’s important not to forget that boots on the ground is the only way to truly document the news.

The Wall Street Journal or CNN aren’t interested in what’s happening in Bumfuck, Iowa unless someone famous was involved or a nuclear bomb hit and they need to worry about fallout hitting somewhere important, like Los Angeles or Chicago.

Living in small town middle America, local news is only coming from local journalists. Big newspapers covering major cities hardly had to care about the small towns around them.

Wick Communications can afford to put its content behind a paywall to this day because of how our culture still respects the media.

In the small town I grew up in with fewer than 50k people, there’s a solid crowd of at least 100k that are interested in things that happen there, especially obituaries.

It turns out there’s still a market for reliable information from multiple sources, and believe it or not, Facebook is actually a great way to keep up with local news when you’re from a small town and everyone is connected to each other online.

People on Facebook have groups to discuss local matters, and our town even has people who bring cameras out to livestream events.

Wick’s local news network (and every major media outlet) is now competing with hyper localized news groups. And they’re always on the lookout for something happening.

This is even happening in Tucson, a large city of over 500k where I live now.

The circulation of news has evolved to where Twitter became a place journalists would source for news (see Trump’s tweets) while Facebook became the place to broadcast it. Both use clickbait.

People don’t want to just read one story – they want to get all the information when they’re interested in something, especially when it’s in the neighborhood.

And the lines between newspapers, news radio, and broadcast TV news got blurred when the internet made it possible to have words, pictures, videos, and sound all in one place.

This means media outlets from large to small are trying to find ways to keep making money so they can stay in business. Clickbait is just one piece.

Some try paywalls – you’re likely not going a week without hitting a paywall somewhere online while reading news. I hit them daily, and it’s starting to leak into social media too.https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/22/twitter-super-follows-and-ticketed-spaces/amp/

Twitter and Facebook are both seeking ways to monetize creators. Quora is doing it too with these ridiculous spaces that creates a Rube Goldberg monetization device when it could just share revenue on everything.

In my opinion, only monetizing Spaces is exactly what ruined Quora, and it’s going to ruin the rest of social media over the next decade the same way you describe the mass media being ruined.

This unionization is one that I think should echo into every industry and drive the 2020s away from the gig economy where we work with no retirement benefits.

But a lot of journalists lost their jobs before the unions, and a lot of freelancers like myself have a tighter shot at being published in mainstream outlets.

That drove a lot of people to migrate to other forums like YouTube, Substack, and more to deliver news independent of a corporate publisher.

And the more people who trust and read news from independent journalists with boots on the ground, The more competition it brings to corporate media outlets.

That means they have to continue merging and acquiring each other to centralize against the high population of decentralized journalists.

All of these journalists are trying to get paid for their work, and they don’t draw the audience that the Avengers and Megan Thee Stallion do.

The more people who prioritize paying to subscribe to news outlets, the fewer ads and paywalls they would need to implement.

But the fact is, people don’t want to pay for truth. Last year when the pandemic hit, Wick lobbied to get government subsidies for local news.

His revenues were hit hard like and other local outlet that still depended largely on physical newspapers. People weren’t going out anymore and didn’t pick up the local weekly at the grocery store.

When the pandemic hit, I also got into a fight with my editor at Phoenix New Times and left the publication.

I covered the Arizona cannabis beat for the largest independent newspaper in our state. Their biggest advertisers were the cannabis industry, which accounts for about 75 percent of all advertising done in most local newspapers you see these days now that legalization is so widespread.

That’s because cannabis companies have limited advertising capabilities because of industry-specific laws in every locality. 

One of the only places they can spend their massive marketing budgets is on newspaper ads. And that meant when I started interviewing state Democrats and learning they’re against legalizing recreational cannabis, it caused a problem.

Proposition 200 (which passed in the November election) gave the in state medical dispensaries even more control than they already had on the industry. 

The liberal lawmakers told me they don’t believe the science because it’s all paid for by the cannabis industry. Cannabis lobbyists filled the state and continued pushing their agenda, which they compared to big pharma and the tobacco industry before regulations.

I support and use cannabis – I even did a lot of work in the decade leading up to legalization with Mikel Weisser of Arizona NORML, a local hero largely responsible for the entire movement in state.

But I’m a whistleblower above all else, and when my editor refused to publish anything that could annoy his biggest advertisers, I had to leave.

I enjoyed my time writing for that publication, and it renewed my credentials as a serious investigative journalist for 6 months. I understood why he killed the story because it would’ve made him fight to keep his advertisers.

Still, once you’ve seen behind the curtains, you can’t see it any other way.

Clickbait headlines will always be a thing. And advertisements and sponsorships will always pay for the news. There’s a lot of money behind the news, even if it’s not going into journalists’ pockets.

But that isn’t any different than any other point in time. 

What’s truly different is the internet makes it possible for people to spread the news on social media. That increases the speed of delivery and forces fact checkers to be on their A game.

And many people who aren’t really performing investigative journalism, interviewing sources, fact checking information, and researching every angle, are presenting themselves like they’re journalists.

Many journalists you see online are really marketers or used ghostwriters. Some are trying to be famous and some are pushing their activist agendas. 

A lot of them are simply repeating the first thing they hear versus reporting on and analyzing their documentation of the situation.

There is only so much a journalist can do to present the truth. The real burden is on you as the reader.