The Public Has Gotten Lazy With News Consumption Habits (Opinion)

You’ve probably noticed a recent shift in our social media reporting, focusing on headlines in image posts without direct links to our website. While part of this has been part of a new marketing strategy to increase our reach, this has also been a bit of an experiment to better understand consumer news reading habits. I have to say, I’m pretty concerned about the results.

We started this experiment posting an article link and an image with the article headline exactly 30 minutes apart. Not only did we validate that Facebook reduces reach of posts with links outside of the platform, but we also validate something we’ve suspected for a long time now. Many people will comment on a topic without ever reading the associated article.

For example, our recent article honoring Tekesha Martinez being featured on a Black History website has only received 56 views, as of publication of this opinion piece. At the same time, the Facebook post with a link to the article has reached 489 people, and the corresponding image-only post with just the headline reached over 1,000 people. The image post itself had a total of 48 interactions such as likes, comments, and shares, and the link post received only 8 interactions. While we cannot establish a one-for-one relationship of interactions to article views, given that most of the interactions were on the image version of the post, it’s highly likely these interactions were from people who did not read the article.

What becomes even more interesting is the ratio of interaction types. Let’s break this down:

Link Post:

• 6 Heart Reactions
• 2 Like Reactions
• 0 Comments

Image Post:

• 9 Laugh Reactions
• 9 Like Reactions
• 8 Heart Reactions
• 10 Comments
• 2 Shares

Sadly, the majority of the comments on the image post were critical of Ms. Martinez, despite the fact that the article was only pointing out her accomplishments, and not expressing any political opinions. But what is truly fascinating is how the number of laugh reactions dominated on the image post, while the number of heart reactions dominated on the link post. From this data, we can infer that people leaving the laugh reactions and angry comments very likely did not even read the article, and merely reacted to the post based upon their own pre-existing opinions of Ms. Martinez.

I’m extremely concerned by this trend, as it has been consistently reinforced by other posts we have made in a similar manner. I of course partially blame Facebook for this, in their suppression of content with links, but news consumers are also clearly to blame for not taking the time to read and research a topic before commenting.

So how do we fix this? Well unfortunately the only way to fix it is to create headlines which entice the reader to visit the website to read the article. This means not revealing the full story in the headlines, but ensuring the headlines aren’t misleading “clickbait”. A very delicate balancing act indeed.

What are your thoughts on this disturbing trend? How do we get people to read and research news topics, instead of simply relying on headlines? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Opinion article by Ken Buckler President and Editor for RFHC, all opinions are his own an do not reflect those of our clients or sponsors.

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