Columnists / Robin Askew
22 reasons why you should click no further
1. Clickbait is out of control.
2. People who used to think of themselves as journalists working on the national and, especially, regional press who haven’t fallen victim to the latest round of sackings increasingly find themselves rebranded as ‘content producers’. Rather than telling you what’s going on, they’re employed in what are little more than shameful Buzzfeed-aping clickbait factories.
3. Because nobody in the ‘old media’ has worked out how to make money from the internet, and they’re still expected to deliver huge profits to pay shareholder dividends and the inflated salaries of clueless senior management, they’re instructing the handful of remaining galley slaves to lure you in with eye-catching headlines and dumb lists.
is needed now More than ever
4. ‘Clicks’ and ‘eyeballs’ equal profits, according to this model. Show a gullible advertiser some impressive figures and they’ll spring open their wallets. Trebles all round!
5. That’s why you’re being treated like a moron with the attention span of the proverbial gnat.
6. Want to know how to decode this stuff and the tricks they use to make you click? Qualifications in rocket science are not required beyond this point.
7. To every headline that’s presented as a question, the answer is invariably ‘no’.
8. Frequently, this device is used for kite-flying stories that even the wretched, desperate, quota-filling ‘journalist’ responsible knows to be untrue. The key imperative is to get a click-magnet subject in the headline: “Will the Glastonbury festival relocate to the Lost City of Atlantis?”; “Do these photographs show Emma Watson in the buff?”; “Is this nondescript bloke really Banksy?”; “Surely a zero hours job in a fast food joint would be more satisfying than churning out this thin, soul-destroying piffle?” and so on. Actually, the answer to that last one is ‘yes’. It’s the exception that proves the rule.
9. Still occasionally seen today, the granddaddy of this stuff is that pensionable standby ‘Is X the new Y?’ where Y is usually ‘rock’n’roll’. Is cake the new rock’n’roll? No, of course it isn’t. Rock’n’roll is still rock’n’roll. Nobody’s finished with it yet.
10. In the superlative arms race, everything is ‘amazing’, ‘incredible’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘mind-blowing’. Even though we all know it isn’t. Contain your astonishment, if you can, at the news that many veteran actresses now appear older than they did in 1971. Look – here are 23 pictures to prove it. This stuff isn’t exclusively sexist. The Mail recently shocked its readers with evidence that middle-aged man Hugh Grant has the body of a middle-aged man.
11. Clickbait is often tailored to push the buttons of actual or target readers. The ultimate B24/7 story would be: 15 reasons why naked bike riding fans of Banksy and Massive Attack are in favour of, or opposed to, the Residents’ Parking Scheme. (Three months ago, George Ferguson would have been in there too. Who remembers him now? Hey – that’s politics.)
12. Think you’re too clever to be snared by such nonsense? Take our simple online test to find out whether you’re a credulous cretin.
13. How annoying is clickbait? Vote in our poll.
14. Commercial organisations and swanky PR agencies are happy to take advantage of overworked hacks by spoon-feeding them stories that can be cut’n’pasted with a by-line and large library photograph attached. That’s where all those spurious surveys come from. Watch out for Bristol’s ten favourite Star Wars characters (based on a survey of 17 people collared by an unpaid intern outside Temple Meads station last Tuesday). There’ll be one of these stories for every town and city in the country whenever a new Star Wars movie is due.
15. The zoo industry is particularly adept at manipulating the news agenda in this way. Bad publicity from a hapless beast being shot dead behind bars or that thoughtful Horizon documentary challenging bogus conservation, education and welfare claims? No worries. Here’s a barrage of pictures of cute baby animals. Awwww. Locally, the press no longer even bothers to mention that Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm pursues a wacko creationist agenda, or that it was expelled from industry body the British & Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums in 2009 because of its relationship with a circus.
16. There’s no intelligently written feature that can’t be carved up into bite-sized sentences of no longer than 25 words and repurposed as a list.
17. Dumb, space-filling ‘lifestyle’ articles can also be treated in this way. That’s why your bulging inbox promises that 17 incredible facts about cheese are just a click away.
18. Of course, I am contractually obliged to point out that there’s nothing wrong with a good list in its place. The foregoing clearly doesn’t apply to any of the lists found anywhere on the marvellous B24/7 website. Full disclosure: I’ve even bashed out a few myself, like this one and this one.
19. The only encouraging thing about this tsunami of crap is that we may be approaching peak clickbait. (We’re also approaching peak ‘referring to things as peak’, but that’s another column for another time.) While there was a certain wit and style to the earliest examples of the genre, the internet is now swamped with feeble, humourless, cynically misleading and nakedly commercial drivel that makes us all feel slightly soiled if we’re reeled in.
20. As a consequence, it’s just possible that dim-bulb advertisers will finally catch on to the fact that ‘eyeballs’ now click away in disgust the moment they realise they’ve been duped. Worse, when suckers find themselves stuck in the cyber quicksand of multiple annoying pop-ups designed to maximise exposure to advertisers, their opinion of the brands infesting their screen may become somewhat jaundiced.
21. Then perhaps we can all go back to a (mythical) happy world where hacks write intelligently for readers who aren’t assumed to be idiots. That’s right: is real journalism the new clickbait?
22. I’ll get me coat.
Read more: 52 big ideas for Bristol