4 July 2014

Online news sites using click-bait headlines

4 July 2014 | TrevaQ

After browsing the online news sources as I regularly do, I have been noticing the trend for the articles to change headlines after an hour or so. You can check yourself by going to the Telegraph, Herald or just at news.com and at the bottom of the articles you will see that many posted more than an hour ago have at the bottom “Originally published as…”. Most of the original headlines are clear click-bait with catchy and extreme language used before they change them to something more informative.

Is this the state of journalism today that stories must appear to be extreme, lewd, offensive or stereotypically polarising rather than informative?

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justin heywood9:28 pm 04 Jul 14

Grrrr said :

It’s the meaningless, inane (sub)headings (largely BuzzFeed inspired) that really give me the irrits. The ones like:

“Person X does something. You won’t believe what happened next!”

Too right, and ‘what happened next’ is invariably not that interesting. After a while, you just stop looking at any of it.

I find news.com is the worst, but they’re nearly all doing versions of it. If that rubbish is the the new journalism, god help us.

Grrrr4:17 pm 04 Jul 14

It’s the meaningless, inane (sub)headings (largely BuzzFeed inspired) that really give me the irrits. The ones like:

“Person X does something. You won’t believe what happened next!”

arescarti421:51 pm 04 Jul 14

Curious.

The fact that the original headline is so much shorter makes me wonder if they do it to make them easier to format for mobile devices.

Holden Caulfield12:09 pm 04 Jul 14

I had wondered if the excessively long article titles were somehow a means to try and get around the Google paywall trick???

Which may also help explain the article title changes, as well as the obvious click-bait you mention.

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