AddThis SmartLayers

News chief hits out at readers’ ‘clickbait’ claims

An editor has hit out at reader accusations over “clickbait” saying her newsroom’s digital transformation has made journalists “more creative than ever.”

Jacqui Merrington, who edits Cornwall Live, wrote an editorial as the county-wide news platform prepared to mark its first anniversary.

In her piece Jacqui discussed the impact that the ‘Chartbeat’ screen, used in a number of Trinity Mirror newsrooms to analyse reader habits online, has had on day-to-day operations.

The screen shows data on how many people are reading stories at any one time, how long they’re spending on stories, how they’re finding them and how many of them are clicking through to other content on the website.

The Chartbeat screen in the Cornwall Live newsroom

The Chartbeat screen in the Cornwall Live newsroom

Wrote Jacqui: “It’s made us more creative than we’ve ever been as a newsroom. We don’t rely on incoming emails and phone calls and press releases and council meetings for what we do any more. That’s not to say we don’t do them. They’re just part of the mix.

“We’re sometimes accused of writing so-called ‘clickbait’. ‘Slow news day?’ type the furious keyboard warriors on the Cornwall Live Facebook page. ‘This story is in Devon,’ adds a bright spark from the comfort of their office chair, where they should probably be working rather than worrying about the provenance of our stories. ‘This is clickbait,’ bashes out another with ill-informed abandon.

“But it’s not clickbait, To me, clickbait is intentionally over-promising or otherwise misrepresenting what you’re going to find when you read a story on the website. It’s often characterised by wording like ‘You won’t believe’ or ‘What happened next will shock you’ or ‘This is the most incredible thing you’ll see today’.

“We don’t do that. We write stories and produce content that is relevant to people in Cornwall – even if that may be in Devon – and headline it in a way that people will want to read it, without misrepresenting the story itself.”

Jacqui went on to compare how headline writing online differed from the skills she was taught as a trainee.

She added: “As a trainee newspaper journalist. I was always told to start my news story with the most interesting elements of the story. Don’t give people the location in the headline, or even the first par – hook people in. Then expand on that in par 2 and 3. Then let the story unravel so the readers wants to get to the end.

“Now working for the web, the reader has to be hooked in from the social media headline, or what would have been – and still is for our print editions – the front page headline. It has to make them want to read more. Is that clickbait? No, it’s just telling a good story well.

“And good stories are at the core of what we do. The stories you read in our newspapers are still written by journalists with local knowledge, people who know their audience and who craft those stories for our websites and the newspaper because they know they’re issues that really matter to our readers.”

9 comments

You can follow all replies to this entry through the comments feed.
  • October 9, 2017 at 8:48 am
    Permalink

    That’s a good definition of clickbait, and it annoys me when readers basically label any tantalising, well-written headline as clickbait.

    The problem with most local sites now isn’t brazen ‘clickbait’ but lightweight content that appeals very successfully (and knowingly) to people’s base idle curiosity rather than any news hunger – as shown by Cornwall Live today, with articles such as ‘Eight of the most spectacular fails when cars got stuck on beaches in Cornwall’.

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(22)
  • October 9, 2017 at 11:24 am
    Permalink

    Get a grip Jacqui! Keep it local and keep it real.

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(16)
  • October 9, 2017 at 12:25 pm
    Permalink

    Yes, why bother listening to the views of readers?

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(12)
  • October 9, 2017 at 1:10 pm
    Permalink

    “It’s made us more creative than we’ve ever been as a newsroom. We don’t rely on incoming emails and phone calls and press releases and council meetings for what we do any more. That’s not to say we don’t do them. They’re just part of the mix.”

    So reporters are trying to get off-diary stories? This really is a brave new world.

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(6)
  • October 9, 2017 at 9:04 pm
    Permalink

    Looking at the dashboard to illustrate this story, engaged time (right column) for all but the top story is very low and the number of concurrent visitors (left) on all but the top article are also very low. If a reader is only engaged for about 12-15 seconds, they are hardly reading or watching for long at all.
    It’s also interesting to note that from that dashboard, if it wasn’t for social media, these stats would be considerably lower. Very dangerous if your traffic is dependent on that traffic source if they change algorithms (as they regularly do).

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(5)
  • October 10, 2017 at 11:09 am
    Permalink

    And looking at the stats on top right of the clickbate screen, sorry, chartbeat screen, over 50% of traffic comes from social media with only 5% of punters going direct to CornwallLive site

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(5)
  • October 10, 2017 at 1:44 pm
    Permalink

    “Don’t give people the location in the headline, or even the first par” is really what you all are thought as trainee journalists?

    It sounds like she thinking her job is as a form of entertainment, I’d preferred news articles in ‘newspapers’ not stories.

    Report this comment

    Like this comment(1)