The cannibalism of news teasers
News teasers on social media do more than just announce the news—they actually deliver the news.
Cutting journalistic production into smaller and faster pieces to fit the flow—the quantization of content—logically led to the emergence of clickbait. Being forced to compete for attention on social media, the news media turn the readers of articles into the readers of recaps. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020).
The transition from periodicity to continuous flow in content production had a dramatic impact on the quality of journalism. This change in the technology of production caused newsrooms to switch from fixed deadlines to rolling ones, which, in reality, were no deadlines at all—but rather a constant pressure to supply content as much and as fast as possible.
Suffering economically, the media orgs cut jobs. Out of necessity, the remaining staffers had to work more in order to support the content stream simply in an effort to attract impulsive clicks from readers. “We give them three times as many things that are completely unimportant,” as Dean Starkman quoted a Wall Street Journal reporter in 2011.
A decade before, the WSJ produced about 22,000 stories per year, “all while doing epic, and shareholder-value-creating, work, like bringing the tobacco industry to heel.” The same number of stories was produced by the Journal in just six months of 2011, and this count did not include “Web-only material, blogs, NewsHub, etc.”
“Do more with less” became the motto of dwindling newsrooms. Churnalism emerged: media staffers used any raw content to publish something—just to keep up with the speed of the flow. Quantity replaced quality. Instead of thoroughly elaborated masterpieces, journalists started churning out series of oftentimes meaningless news, such as “Sheriff plans no car purchases in 2011,” as quoted by Dean Starkman, who coined the term ‘hamsterization of journalism.’ He wrote that,
The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no… But it’s more than just mindless volume. it’s a recalibration of the news calculus… The Hamster Wheel, then, is investigations you will never see, good work left undone, public service not performed.
***
Cutting journalistic production into smaller and faster pieces to fit the flow—the quantization of content—logically led to the emergence of clickbait. This process resulted in an interesting paradox—one that proved lethal for good-old journalism.
An editor seeks to lure readers by compressing articles into snippets on social media and loading them with the most significant information and all the juiciest details from the originals. Ironically, however, the more attractive the teaser and the more information it carries, the less need readers have to actually follow the link and read the full article on the media outlet’s website.
The catch is that, while competing for audiences with other news sources, news snippets do more than just announce the news—they actually deliver the news. News bits turn into news baits that do not lure readers but rather feed them to satiety. As a result, news baits are news bits that the media give away for free.
News teasers of the past were not able to do that, as they did not garner enough flow. Three or four catchy teasers on a print magazine’s cover did not shape the agenda or erode readers’ impulse to dive in.
The internet changed this. When recaps, headlines, teasers, announcements, and news baits (accompanied by users’ comments) flood one’s news feed on social media, they are capable of deleivering the news agenda on their own. There is no need for further reading. Being well-cooked news bits, click baits do not evoke clicks when there is a sufficient torrent of them in the flow.
Thus, the side effect of the further quantization of media is cannibalism: the recap devours the original article. Being forced to compete in announcements, the media turn the readers of articles into the readers of recaps.
What this does to media business (or what remains of it) is needless to say. It is impossible to sell announcements; nobody can sell bait to fish. The quantization of content down to the level of teaser and clickbait on social media dispossesses the media from content they produce even more than was the case on Web 1.0, which delivered separate articles.
***
Legacy media have continued doing their job of news compression better than ever before. If we set aside the business needs of media organizations, it’s worth noting that news-gathering technologies have improved dramatically. But there’s no good news for the media business in this, as outlets end up hostage to social networks. By adjusting their news to the streams flowing on the networks’ platforms in pursuit of a bigger audience, the publishers give up both their news and their audiences to the platforms.
News baits are self-contained bits of media content that, on a statistically significant scale, are capable of feeding everyone’s newsfeeds sufficiently to shape the panorama of the day. The gratuitous giveaway of news bits causes the natural weathering of media content that could otherwise have been used by the media for news retail, as was the case in the past.
Under such conditions, media content cannot be a commodity—purely for technical reasons—no matter how interesting it is. Any attempt to sell content to those already oversupplied with it in the form of news baits is doomed. There will be no paywalls paid from below. All paywalls that exist today are either dying relics or represent a different business model: surrogate membership…
Excerpts from Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
