Working on a ‘trending’ news desk is the journalistic equivalent of being a battery-farmed hen. When I was still at university, I wrote pieces for one of the most-visited clickbait news sites in the UK, which boasts 300 million followers worldwide. My brief was to pump out a 400-word article in 45 minutes, every 45 minutes, for nine hours straight. My fee for these 12 articles was £125 in total (£13 per hour or, more saliently to a student, a pint for 250 words).
All of you will have come across clickbait online. Some of you might even admit to having clicked on it. Who doesn’t want to know which vegetables are killing you, which celebrities are married to their cousins, or what Victoria Starmer’s beauty regimen consists of (especially given that ‘step five will surprise you’)? In my brief time as a professional clickbaiter I learnt the grim formula for producing an article which over-promises and, 30 seconds of scrolling later, underdelivers.
Who doesn’t want to know which vegetables are killing you, or which celebs are married to their cousins?
The first ‘trending’ news story allocated to me set the tone for my new job: ‘Kristen Bell Said Her Family Farts So Much They Didn’t Smell Rot In Their Home.’ The extent to which this can be described as either ‘newsworthy’ or ‘trending’ is dubious. In the eyes of my editor, it qualified for a story since at least five other online outlets had covered it within the past week.
For clickbait factories, this loose interpretation of ‘news’ has two advantages. Firstly, it removes the need for any fact-checking, research or thought. If you think that 45 minutes is long enough to undertake any original journalism whatsoever on these kinds of stories, then you need a psychological examination.
Secondly, these stories are safe bets in the mindless content churn.
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