I thought newspapers wouldn’t survive the Internet but
what happened next made me cry…!
(See what I did there?)
Last week, I was talking about how clickbaiting works and I thought that it would be interesting to further continue this line of
thought focusing on what this increase of clickbaits across the Internet
actually means for other "real" news outlets.
It's clear that it's tough for every paper across the
globe to remain successful in times of directly available, free information
online any time - but maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most big newspapers
have succeeded to build a more or less stable online presence (take a look at Spiegel Online or The Guardian), but the times they are a-changin'.
Next to heavily emotional!, exciting! clickbait
"news" those good old-fashioned news articles seem rather dull and
tend to get lost amidst the masses of posts, they just don't stand out unless
they are about some very recent big news (like Fukushima some years ago). Who,
after all, would claim to be interested in depressing and frustrating news on
politics and catastrophes after a long day of work? Yeah, you get the idea.
And while huge numbers of clicks are nice for those
few big news sites that are “successful”, they don't help much to bring in
money. Most users use adblockers and won't agree to subscriptions, they’d rather
search for websites with free content (another way to compete – which is
completely toxic to one's own work in the end). And real-life subscriptions of
newspapers have been steadily declining these last decades anyway.
Will this eventually be the end for newspapers as we
know them? The times they are a-changin' but the media tries its best to keep
up.
About five years ago I started to be more interested
in real news and in this short time so much has changed about what is
considered “news”. It seems that the number of commentaries and “soft” news has
not just increased, it almost exploded. Even those news sources that are (still)
considered reputable, have long begun to publish articles on kitten that had been
rescued (no offense, kitten – I still love you) and oh so tragic stories. Of
course, sometimes it can’t be helped to search for “filler news” when nothing
else is available that could be interesting in any way, but in times like these
with rapid changes all about every single day?
I don’t buy it. Actually, it really feels as if “real”
news sites try to mimic what clickbait sites have been doing for years – more or
less subtly. But is it really the right strategy to just copy what everyone
else is doing – and thus risking the quality of one’s own content. I highly
doubt it.
"Newstainment is the product of 24 hour news stations which are a combination of news and entertainment. The news portions fill in the space between the entertainment which is what gets the viewers. Some stations like to also use exaggeration, innuendo and deceptive practices like splicing stock footage of crowds into a story to make it look more newsworthy. They all have a slant to oneideology or another but that is mainly to appeal to their newstainment audiencewho do not like hearing confusing viewpoints that disagree with or are different than their own. Negative news stories about the ideological opposition is a staple of Newstainment."
No comments:
Post a Comment