Don't mine sympathy for clicks
On media ownership, sympathetic instincts, and the distasteful use of tragedy as clickbait
A fair number of news outlets that once were owned mainly by small ownership groups but now belong to sprawling national media "groups" have sought to bump their online traffic figures by posting clickbait in the form of articles drawn from their "sister" stations. These stories are often gut-wrenching stories about calamitous events taking the lives of sympathetic characters like children or fire fighters or police officers -- stories that have always made it hard to look away.
■ And that's the point, of course. Posted along with a snapshot of an attractive adult in their prime or of a cherubic little person, sometimes the social-media editors involved add nothing more than a comment like "Tragic." or "Rest in peace.", with no further context.
■ This is misleading, of course, because a "local" news outlet is intuitively expected to be focused on local events. We humans only have so much attention we can pay to tragedies, and it's inescapable that we take more interest in those that happen close to home (where it is at least somewhat possible that we might know, or be within a few degrees of separation of, the victim) than in those happening far away.
■ There is something especially ghoulish about profiting off stories of distant tragedies in this way -- it's misleading, if not outright deceptive, for those stories to be mined for local attention when they are not actually local. It's a form of mining human sympathy for clicks.
■ It's a particularly despicable practice when the story doesn't actually advance anything new worth knowing. Sometimes there actually are new and real dangers that demand widespread attention. But those instances are few and far between; more often, the clickbait is merely there to report on a freak incident -- one-in-a-million events that, statistically, are unavoidable in a country of 330 million people.
■ The practice should be discouraged, if not widely disclaimed altogether. It's not journalistically novel nor productive, and it probably depletes the reservoirs of attention that people can afford to expend on tragic stories without having to tune out altogether. That can be a real danger when there are very big and very troubling problems that also demand attention, especially because they are matters that human beings can and should try to change. Times are tough for local media, to be sure. But they shouldn't undermine public expectations of context, balance, and local newsworthiness along the way.
