9 ms·
Should a news source be optimizing for engagement, or for accuracy in communicating facts? I understand it's a business, but it's analogous to a bakery that la
by JasonFruit 6y ago
Should a news source be optimizing for engagement, or for accuracy in communicating facts? I understand it's a business, but it's analogous to a bakery that labels all its goods as its best-selling items, only to confuse and disappoint the buyer when they open the box and find something different inside. It may sell that product that time, but it goes against the purpose of the organization as a whole, and doesn't seem like a sustainable practice.
- refurb 6y agoThis is my takeaway. There is a huge incentive for the media to make things more sensational or dramatic because it drives clicks and views. I might also argue that online news drives this more so than print - with print you tend to buy the paper based on the totality of their reporting and reputation versus a zero-cost click of a headline on your screen.
- justapassenger 6y agoIt’s fundamentally possible to have both. Although, yes, it’s very tempting to sacrifice one for the other, once you start to optimize.
- moscovium 6y agoIs it not the goal of a headline to engage?
- JasonFruit 6y agoYes, but not at the cost of accuracy.
- site-packages1 6y agoBut multiple headlines can both be accurate with one being more engaging. These aren't mutually exclusive. Article about a bank robbery: "First National Bank Robbed" "Gunmen Rob First National Bank in Daring Robbery"
- AareyBaba 6y agoMy favorite this year was from the Times of India on the Jan 6th US capital insurrection. "Coup Klux Klan: Don triggers mob & rob bid"
- solarkraft 6y ago"Engaging" while being highly irritating. The first one is concise.
- penetraitor69 6y agoTrue, but which is more likely to get your click: a headline you're indifferent to, or a headline that fills you with righteous indignation? I think that if there's one thing that the development of social media has taught us about human nature, it's that any emotion is better than boredom, from an engagement standpoint.
- johncena33 6y agoThat doesn't mean what OP has mentioned is wrong. NYT has a history of misleading headlines [1]. [1] https://thepostmillennial.com/nyt-makes-terrorism-story-into-police-shooting-story https://thepostmillennial.com/nyt-makes-terrorism-story-into...
- afavour 6y agoIs there actually an either/or here? Surely it’s possible to write two (or more) headlines for a story that are all equally accurate?
- rossdavidh 6y agoBut, from the OP article, that doesn't particularly seem to describe at least some of these cases.
- JasonFruit 6y agoYes, but did you read the examples in the article? Many of the high-engagement headlines ignored most of the content in favor of a tangential but titillating detail. That's National Enquirer stuff, not what the New York Times has prided itself on being.
- afavour 6y agoI did, but honestly most of the examples confused me. Both the Tesla rocket example and Cuomo story are surely headline changes relating to the story changing? They didn’t add “Cuomo apologizes” to titillate, it’s because… he apologized, and he hadn’t when the story was first published. Which isn’t even A/B testing! The article also more or less states this, hence my confusion.
- comex 6y agoI think the same is true for the Trump CPAC speech article. The blog post compares the initial headlines about him “claiming leadership” to the ones about him attacking other Republicans. But just from eyeballing the chart, first the headline changes from “Plans to Claim” to “Claims”, presumably around when he started giving the speech, and then shortly afterward it’s changed to mention him attacking Republicans, probably at the point in the speech where he did that. There does seem to be an A/B test between the last two headlines, “Trump Pledges G.O.P. Unity, Then Attacks Republicans Who Backed Impeachment” vs. “Trump’s Republican Hit List at CPAC Is a Warning Shot to His Party”. But that’s not the comparison the blog post makes. And among those two, while the winning headline (the second one) is clickbaitier, both focus on the same part of the speech, and neither is inaccurate.
- nkozyra 6y agoHeadlines have become advertisements. They're almost never written by the journalists who wrote the story, they're written for space constraints that change on a whim ... They're very rarely "accurate" the way stories are intended to be for these reasons.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 6y agoHave journalists ever controlled or written their own headlines? I don't think this is a change from any point in newspaper history.
- selestify 6y agoWhy has it been historically separated like this?
- spoonjim 6y agoTwo reasons: the headline writers need to know exactly how many characters to use, as part of the prepress process, right in the layout room, while the journalists are out in the field, and 2) headline writing is its own skill (especially for tabloid headlines).
- lupire 6y agoBecause the headline isn't part of the story, it's part of the index/ToC of the whole paper, so it's written by the staff that put the whole paper together.
- LanceH 6y agoWhich is to say, it's always been click bait.
- adolph 6y agoThe latency of decision cycle was too great in previous times. Even within digital workflows the length of time between knowledge of final space available on the physical page and when that space had to be filled with text was too short to haggle with a writer. It had to be performed by a smaller set of people right next to the people laying the type of not the people laying the type.
- throw_m239339 6y ago> Should a news source be optimizing for engagement, or for accuracy in communicating facts? A journal is a business, with something to sell, the news, and the attention of their readers to advertisers as well. > The New York Times is a big deal. As they tell their advertisers, the NYT is the #1 news source for young, rich thought leaders: Obviously ultimately it reflects badly on the profession, since all these news sites are using the same clickbait techniques, from Breibart to the Dailymail to NYT, since they probably hire the same consultancies when it comes to clickbaiting design, or at the very least, people who come from the same marketing circles/education.
- lupire 6y agoDo young people read the NYT?
- unethical_ban 6y agoA simple answer to a simple question: Yes.
- ofrzeta 6y ago> the same marketing circles/education. Also "young, rich thought leaders", right?
- monch1962 6y agoIt _usually_ makes sense to optimise for engagement, particularly in the US where there's no state-funded media outlet (cue discussion about socialism that will be ignored). The UK has the BBC, Australia has the ABC, and both are state funded media outlets that aren't (at least overtly) driven by views. I'm sure their funding largely depends on how many people are consuming their product, but it's not as though some editor is going to be fired that afternoon if their "Oprah/Meghan" story loses out to the Murdoch equivalent. I'd be curious to compare how A/B testing works for state-funded media vs pay-for-access media outlets
- jordan_curve 6y agoThere’s absolutely state-funded media in the U.S. It just doesn’t encompass as much as those in the UK or Australia. C-Span is a good example.
- lwf 6y agoThe Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network[1] isn't publicly funded, no. PBS, NPR, and, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting[2], lots of individual, independent local radio and television stations. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...
- clairity 6y agonpr gets like 2% of its funding from public sources, despite being national public radio. they're as beholden to moneyed and corporate interests as nytimes, and as partisan and outrage-oriented too. i stopped donating years ago.
- JPKab 6y agoI had to stop as well. The article defending looting was absolutely a breaking point.
- mxcrossr 6y agoIf people don’t like click bait I recommend not using news aggregators that only show the headline and are curated based on the votes of users who don’t read the articles!
- wp381640 6y agoYou know of an aggregator that shows the actual headlines? The ones I read use a usually poorly editorialised headline created by the user.
- tjs8rj 6y agoI made zipnews.io, aggregates the news of the day on any topic and sends you a short blurb summarizing the top 5 stories. Headlines are included.
- CarVac 6y agoSounds like someone needs to make an aggregator that shows only brief auto-generated summaries, no headlines or images.
- hkai 6y agoEven better, these autogenerated summaries should give most weight to paragraphs at the end of the article. I often find that New York Times and other media put important details that sometimes contradict the headline or challenge the main idea of the article somewhere close to the end of the article. This lets them still claim objectivity while preserving a highly polarizing message.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- godmode2019 6y agoThis has a name its called burying the lead, its used because news papers are structured in a way where they know people have limited attention so usually they don't read to the end. All the important bits are typically laied out linearly, often trailing off at the end. Burying the lead takes advance if this and puts the important but inconvenient information at the bottom.
- NetOpWibby 6y agoThis is why I’m letting my NYT subscription expire. I see no difference between them and tabloids. Sensationalist junk.
- tootie 6y agoIt's not an either/or. I work at a place that produces serious news. User engagement pays the bills and it also gets vital news in front of more eyes. Summing up a complex story into one sentence that convinces a reader to click and learn more is an art unto itself.
- taude 6y agoExcept most readers don't go on to actually read much of the article. One of the problems I have with NYTimes (and others) is that the contents of an article, especially if you read the full story, are often times quite different than the assumption the headlines is implying. Afterall, who really has 20 minutes to spend long-form reading a single article? Better for the publication to just tell you what you need to think with a simple 10 syllable headline. (I'm joking here, but think it's a valid observation on others around me consuming the media). The other problem I have, and why I stopped subscribing to them was their app was terrible and mostly only promoted opinion pieces to me. In fact, I'd love the OP of the story to study how many of the top 10 articles are opinion pieces at any piece of time.
- rkho 6y agoIt's the goal of Meredith Levien, their current CEO, for the NYT to be considered a "world class tech company"[1]. I believe doing A/B tests is a way to work towards that goal. [1]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meredith-levien-wants-the-nyt-to-be-a-world-class-tech-company https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meredith-levien-want...
- samdfonseca 6y agoThe article is what communicates facts. The headline is just an advertisement to draw the user in to read it. Optimizing the headline means the article is able to inform more people; in line with the mission of the organization. NYT wants to increase subscribers, not ad revenue, so it's incentivized to not confuse and disappoint readers with clickbait headlines.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]