Just a thought or two on the headline making process in light of the recent attention on “fake news.” A lot of fake news is pretty easily disregarded if you’re making an effort to be more or less objective. In my mind, headlines are a more pernicious subject. It’s my understanding that headlines mostly are not written by the journalists writing the article, and I think this gives rise to an editorial slant. The slant isn’t necessarily conservative or liberal, but if the headline writer is higher up in the hierarchy, there might be a tendency to write headlines that get more clicks or sell more papers.
I was close enough to a local story recently to see this play out, and I think it might be a more or less representative case. The journalist wrote a pretty straightforward account of a government action which was going to maintain the status quo. The headline made it sound like something controversial was happening. With the headline priming the reader for controversy, it really took some studying of the body of the article to determine that nothing very remarkable was taking place.
That feeds into a notion I’ve had that’s anecdotal and far from scientific on my part, but I’ve had the feeling with a number of articles over the years that the headlines skewed “conservative” while the bulk of the article skewed “liberal.” In any vent, the person skimming headlines gets a very different impression than the person reading closely.
Maybe it would be helpful to have a separate by-line when the headline is written by someone other than the author of the article. No solid thoughts here, just thinking out loud.
Yes.
All headlines are now “click bait”.
Even from reputable news sources.
For every time a reader “clicks” on the headline to read more, google analytics collects that data, which is essential to the selling that asset to their advertisers = revenue.
Whether the article has been read, reflects the headline accurately, or is entirely fake.l, is irrelevant bc the advertisers are buying in bulk and don’t parse through the content.
There’s been two notable movements to get advertisers on Breitbart to be held accountable for the quality of the “news” on that site…for this very reason.
Noting the trends of how these headlines have been slanting, is valuable data for reflecting our times.
Or as the old saying goes, “If they’re not trying to sell you a product…You’re the product.”
I agree. That’s what drove my new year’s resolution to make sure I always read an article before sharing it: https://funnelfiasco.com/blog/2016/12/30/my-new-years-resolution/