I like the EPOCH Times, but they’ve gotten a bit clickbait-y, at least in their email updates—Bad News for the Double-Vaccinated. SCOTUS Delivers Surprise Decision.
Yesterday it was “CDC Alert for ‘Unknown’ Outbreak” with a picture of a Cruise ship and “FBI Warning on ‘Extremely Alarming’ Threat.”
I am rarely rewarded when I follow these links, but I understand why they use them. It gets clicks. No matter how often you see it and go, ‘Click Bait,’ there is still some percentage of these that you’ll follow the way women who like bad men can’t stop dating them. It’s human nature. Some of the most well-trafficked sites on the internet readily admit to using clickbait headlines to draw people in because it works.
It is why what many of us scoff at as obvious phishing emails or texts keep coming. Someone, somewhere, is falling for it. Enough of them to make the practice worth repeating or emulating.
We try NOT to do that (clickbait), but I will admit to what we have done along the same vein. I’ll remove a state or a person from a headline to give it broader appeal, not out of a desire to be deceptive, but because it is likely relevant to your neck of whatever political woods in which you find yourself and excising the local reference widens the potential audience, in my opinion, to their benefit.
Allow me to explain.
One of the first things I learned while hanging out with former CNHT Chairman Ed Naile (he passed in January of 2022) was that if it is happening in that town, it might be or likely is in yours. People, government, and people drawn to government are an equation that inevitably results in a similar sum. Petty indiscretions become systemic corruption, which they will do whatever they can to hide.
Eventually, the system around the parts you can change rots or rejects the new people you put in place to try and fix it.
If we publish a story about taxes, embezzlement, or refusing to give up public documents, that’s a story in almost every town. Local school and town boards, zoning, you name it, your town has those people (not all of them or always, but enough of them), and that situation is happening or waiting to happen. If the lunch lady gets caught stealing 50,000.00 dollars, it is probably 150,000.00, and the watchdogs you elected are terrified you’ll find out how badly they mishandle your trust.
If you’d like an extreme example of how bad this can get, check out this recent interview with Grok Author Laurie Ortolano.
That’s how I justify it. All politics is local, and that includes yours. People drawn to positions of power are those most likely to abuse it, and your politicians are no different. If it is happening in Nashua, New Hampshire, or Burlington, Vermont, you’ve got those people in your town, too, and you need to try and keep them honest – that’s your job, but you need to know what to look for, and those stories we share help. They serve as cairns, waymarkers, and a road map to the potential for misfeasance or malfeasance.
Hopefully, that’s what we’re doing with the understanding that most of the headlines are written by the authors without too much interference from me. How are they or I doing?
I hope our readers will let us know if they think a headline is leaning toward clickbait, misleading, or – here’s the critical bit – fails to deliver on the promise of its words. Clickbait headlines are not bad if they deliver with the goal of creating something that convinces people to follow a link and then rewards them for it.
I suppose it’s not clickbait if it does that; it’s just a great headline, but you get my point. I hop.
