Clickbait | Media Watch

The National's Media Watch panel on clickbait: should online popularity determine a story's news value?

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The National is CBC Television's flagship news program. Airing seven days a week, the show delivers news, feature documentaries and analysis from some of Canada's leading journalists.

[DareBStoopid]

Jeet sounds like a genuinely nice person.

[MRayner]

When it comes to news, the great thing about the Internet is that it you can make of it what you will. For those interested in serious news and in-depth analysis, there’s a plethora of quality journalism and editorial opinion available from an incredibly diverse range of sources and perspectives. Those uninterested in such things can ignore it completely and focus only on what interests them, however trivial and irrelevant it may seem to others.

A big downside the world of online news however is the tendency – sometimes intentional, but also often not so much with preferences being automated by outfits like Google – for people to become isolated in “silos” of information reflecting a certain, often highly biased, ideological perspective. These news bubbles will tend to feed into and reinforce the preconceptions of their audience and can end up producing an awfully distorted view of the world. Unsurprisingly, viewers/readers who rarely venture outside of them for their information, therefore tend to have a correspondingly skewed and sometimes even weirdly demented understanding of what’s going on in the world.

[RobertDerusha]

I think there are two discussions for click-baiting. One is the content of the story. And two is the method of hooking the viewers attention. Viral or puff pieces will always exist in the news. As the news has always been a source of both information and entertainment. Just so long as there is a separation of departments where one produces story's the people want to see. And the other produces the story's they need to see. I would prefer the latter to be the larger as well. At least such that all that needs to be told can be told.