What Clickbait Tells Us About the Evolution of Print and Online Media

There’s a phrase often thrown around in journalism: “Don’t become the news.” In its simplest form, this aphorism is meant to underscore the need for objectivity in one’s reporting: Don’t insert yourself into the story; maintain the neutrality you owe your readers. Read another way, however, it becomes general advice to a world obsessed with celebrity and even notoriety. The pursuit of being newsworthy, it suggests, rarely leads to happiness. Whether you’re a trad wife whose brand went viral and then got painfully exposed in a Times of London feature or the would-be assassin of a presidential candidate, if you find yourself compelled to action by the imagined reactions of the wider public, then you’ve probably set off down the wrong path.

“Becoming the news” is a dirty business—that much everyone can agree on. Even the people who turn themselves into brands would rather tell you they’re “living their authentic lives” in public, not tailoring them to the algorithm. On Instagram and TikTok, we suspend disbelief as we watch moneyed Utah wives make crayons from scratch for their perfectly manicured children.

At political conventions, no one breaks kayfabe as they talk about their salt-of-the-earth, soccer-coach, suburban life, somehow entirely compatible with a trip to DC every other week and an expense account that runs into the hundreds of thousands. Billionaires and Hollywood actors and venture capitalists are “just so lucky,” #blessed. They’re supposed to profess that they’re embarrassed about the attention they invited, or the public will quickly turn on them.

“Clickbait” is the dirty word everyone’s avoiding. No one wants to be the disappointing morsel at the end of the dangled line.

Back when newspapers were mainly print and the digital evolution was merely a spot on the horizon, we used to talk about “making readers eat their vegetables.” What this meant was juxtaposing less exciting, but more worthy, content with the salacious stuff the masses were presumed to want. The sordid details of a politician’s affair appear on the same page as a feature about the economy; the profile of the pop singer is placed a few pages behind the Middle East correspondent’s dispatch from the Lebanese border; the sports pages are always, always at the end. Readers had to be cajoled into consuming high-brow content, went the thinking. Push the broccoli rabe of the policy announcement before rewarding them with the strawberry soft-serve of this summer’s fashion must-haves.

A lot of people lament the death of the “eating your vegetables” model. Many believe that readers were better informed when a physical paper was in their hand, compelling them to battle through that economic treatise before landing on the movie reviews. There’s no proof, of course, that that ever happened; it’s just as likely that readers who cared more about film than the economy turned straight to the Culture section as soon as they bought the paper.

But back then—before audience measurement technology, before SEO analysis, before everyone inside the publication could see with their own eyes how many readers consumed the lifestyle listicles versus how many read through 2,000 words of philosophizing—everyone could pretend. And pretending meant that everyone got paid the same, and everyone was seen as an equal part of the machine.

These days, it’s more of a dog-eat-dog world. Inside the newsroom, people battle it out for reader share in real time. It’s easy to portray this shift as a decline in journalism and to reminisce about the good ol’ days when we were all on equal footing. But to do so would be to ignore how deeply paternalistic the “eat your vegetables” strategy was. Instead of caring what readers actually wanted to read, the “eat your vegetables” newspaper appointed a small group of usually white, male editors and told them to decide what the public deserved to know. They then compiled a publication in their own image. Little wonder that anything pertaining to the female perspective spent a long time hidden behind a small “Women’s” section. Little wonder that the only content catered properly to people of color or members of the LGBT community ended up outside of mainstream publications entirely for decades.

Clickbait likes to think of itself as the egalitarian alternative to the paternalistic “eat your vegetables” strategy. Short stories selling sex, death and fear under the banner of a super-simplified, “look-at-me” headline are what people really want, we’re told, and dissent is snobbery. Such clickbait stories tailor content around what readers are already expressing an interest in, according to specialized algorithms, and feed it back to them in various guises. It looks very different to “eat your vegetables”  but fundamentally, it views readers in a very similar way.

I started my career in a linen closet on my best friend’s floor. We were writing a blog called The Vagenda at the time, which we pitched to the wider public (well, our friendship group) as the antidote to increasingly out-of-touch women’s magazines. By day, I wrote press releases about technological innovations in the wholesale broadband space for a PR firm, which was about as scintillating as it sounds. By night, I sat at my friend Rhiannon’s kitchen table and we wrote satirical content about Cosmopolitan magazine before I went to bed under a blanket her grandma had knitted, my legs wrapped around her apartment’s large, Victorian-era boiler. We prayed for fame and fortune.

And in our own, small way, we got it. The Vagenda went viral; after just 24 hours, we had 60,000 readers. The magazines we’d poked fun at listened, and evolved. Editors reached out to us. We both ended up getting proper jobs in journalism out of the attention, working for respected publications. We were lucky. We were #blessed. We were good at writing clickbait.

What do you learn in a newsroom? Some people learn not to have an ego, others develop one. I’ve seen people walk around like the farm’s chief cockerel because their piece did 100,000 uniques on a Thursday morning. I’ve seen celebrities pull out of interviews because someone on the Opinion desk wrote an unflattering op-ed about them once, and they Googled it before sitting down with a culture writer. I’ve seen stories about pansexual beauty pageant winners selling sex toys fail to rank, and 4,000-word features about the Cambodian genocide do crazy numbers. What I’ve learned—infuriatingly, to the people at the top of the tree—is that readers are unpredictable. Sometimes their basest instincts can be manipulated for money, but other times they’re just not interested.

There is an interesting dynamic in journalism in 2024. At the top of the tree are editors—people who, in the olden days, had paid their dues on the front lines and then settled in at the top—and those are the people who dictate the stories and write the headlines but whose bylines never adorn the pages. Then there are the reporters, who put their names to those stories and see the consequences on social media. Increasingly, the editors are not former reporters; they are, instead, either strategists or experts in audience measurement. As you can imagine, this system leads to intra-office controversies. Reporters want to preserve their good name; editors want to generate enough numbers on the audience measurement chart that nobody gets fired.

And yet, these newsrooms are also more diverse than they have ever been. People like me—who grew up with no connections to speak of, whose parents did not have impressive jobs in journalism or generational wealth — get to do things we’d never have been able to do before (like, in my case, run a political team during a general election.) People much less privileged and more impressive than me get to write, edit and manage. Decisions are made based on data, rather than vibes. We can talk all day about whether that data may or may not be evil—sometimes it definitely is—but we can’t deny that having some independent arbiter of what does well and who counts as a reader has forced newspapers to become more heterogeneous places.

My debut novel, Clickbait—a title you surely saw coming—is set inside the worst case scenario of this environment: an aggregation-heavy tabloid that juices its staff and then discards them. Having worked in various newsrooms and for a number of different publications over the decade since we launched The Vagenda, I’ve seen the best and the worst of journalism, and I’d like to think I can hold a mirror up to its least flattering face pretty well. In satirizing the problem, I have no comprehensive, practical solution: my novel is not a manifesto.

But I believe that the conceptual core of any solution is that we should proceed in good faith when we imagine our readers. Like how social media devolves into dogpiling and straw-manning when we choose to read others’ words in their most bad-faith incarnations, a newspaper quickly becomes a cesspit when we believe our readers to be fools and voyeurs. Nothing, but nothing, ever beats out thoughtful, original content.

You still need an eye-catching headline, though.

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Clickbait by Holly Baxter is available from Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.