Friday, February 19, 2016

Clickbait Journalism: Would you know it if you saw it?

There is debate within the journalism community about clickbait. Here is the definition in Wikipedia:
Clickbait is a pejorative term describing web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. Clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough information to make the reader curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.
I've blogged about this subject in the past and will make this point again to be clear: I am not a journalist. What I do on this blog is feature items sent to me by readers or news items from sources such as newspapers, TV news, other blogs, press releases, etc., and also write about issues (mainly concerning Lake Worth), this for instance, I think will interest my readers.

On Twitter, for those of you who don't know, you're limited to 140 characters (including word spaces) but that changes if you add an image. In the Tweet below by CBS12/WPEC there was plenty of room to indicate where this tragic event occurred. Was it Boca Raton? Wellington? Somewhere in the Treasure Coast?
If you were curious to find out where this event happened and clicked (Gotcha!) you learn it occurred in Texas. That's right. The state of Texas just north of Mexico. A long, long way from southeast Florida. But in order to find that out you had to click on the CBS12/WPEC Tweet.

Here's another one from ABC25/WPBF:
Where did this brawl happen? Somewhere in Palm Beach County, Florida? In Palm Beach Gardens? West Palm Beach? No. This happened in Birmingham, Alabama. But you don't find that out until you click the link.

Now you know what clickbait journalism is. FYI, here in my review of TV News in central Palm Beach County.