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Abstract
Introduction. This article offers an analysis of "clickbait", one of the latest strategies employed by online news media to lure users into clicking a hyperlink through the use of non-journalistic values. Methods. The study is based on the analysis of the news headlines found on the front and inner pages of general-information newspapers of the 28 EU member countries. Results. The main consequence of the use of clickbait is that the news headline has gone from being just a key element to provide information to also crucial element to persuade the reader to stay on the page for as long as possible. Discussion. The results confirm the presence of clickbait in most of the newspapers analysed, to the detriment of traditional journalistic values in the writing and editing of headlines. Conclusions. The study concludes that general-information newspapers in the 28 EU member countries generate clicks not through quality content but rather, in nearly half the cases, through catchy, provocative and sensationalist front-page headlines that aim to exploit the curiosity in users.
Keywords: Journalism; audiences; cyber media; digital communication; Internet; ICT.
Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. Methods. 2.1. Objective, population and sample. 2.2. Analysis. 2.3. Data collection instruments. 3. Results. 4. Discussion and Conclusions. 5. Limitations and future research. 6. Acknowledgments. 7. References.
Translation by CA Martínez-Arcos
(PhD in Communication, University of London)
1.Introduction
In the liquid media ecosystem (Bauman, 2007) that has been configured in the network society (Castells, 1996), information circulates at a great speed, virtually in real-time (Guallar, 2011), and the news production of cyber media, as part of the process of adaptation to the new scenario, follows the dominant constant-news-updating logic that has set in motion an uninterrupted cycle (RodríguezMartínez, Codina & Pedraza-Jiménez, 2010; Casero-Ripollés, 2012), in which the efforts of news producers focus on persuading users to click on hyperlink headlines. News media organisations have had to face a process of mediamorphosis (Fidler, 1997) or remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) to adapt themselves to the functioning of a communicative environment in which they must be present because it is there where users seek information (Jarvis, 2009). Changes in the news production process in the network society (Harcup, 2013) interweave old and new media (Jenkins, 2006) and derive in a hybrid...