I recently read Trust Me, I'm Lying (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lyi...) and one of the central points of the book is that journalists HAVE to act this way, especially at the moment. If everything is page view driven, the bloggers MUST come up more more and more anger/fear/happiness in their headlines to survive. They also must chase the breaking news, even if it's false. If they don't they will perish.
The same applies all the way up the chain, from infowars to huffpo to the NYT.
The same thing happened before (the yellow press era) and, hopefully, it will run its course but right now, only the maximally sharable posts survive.
IIRC, Holiday posits that the turn away from yellow journalism was the advent of the subscription model, where papers didn't need to sell each issue. Subscribers then could look at the overall quality of the product rather reacting to the sensational headline du jour.
As an aside, I subscribe to a couple of online news outlets, one of which is mixed subscriber/ad supported. I wish that I, as a subscriber, could see more informational/less sensational headlines as a benefit of being a subscriber.
> If everything is page view driven, the bloggers MUST come up more more and more anger/fear/happiness in their headlines to survive.
Papers like the Wall Street Journal want your subscription dollars, not your page views. They can access those by maintaining a reputation for quality. It's a nice stable revenue stream, too.
(I suppose it also helps that they cover things other outlets often don't, like international business news.)
The same applies all the way up the chain, from infowars to huffpo to the NYT.
The same thing happened before (the yellow press era) and, hopefully, it will run its course but right now, only the maximally sharable posts survive.