Four children's bodies found with woman
Hiker murder suspect now focus of Florida case
Pregnant Marine vanishes before testifying
Police: Spiteful dad threw 4 tots off bridge
'Brutal execution' caught on tape, U.S. says
KSAT: Medic never checked victim's pulse
2 children among 5 deaths blamed on weird weather
Man sees 'mark of the beast,' cuts off hand
3 die in 50-car pileup in fog, smoke
Investigator: Tiger attack victims will not face charges
Roughly half of the stories on the site at that moment pertained directly with murder or tragic death in extremis.
This death story ratio on CNN.com is considerably higher, I believe, than the death ratio of CNN’s TV news coverage.
None of these stories affects me. Not in the way that politics and world events and the economy and public policy issues affect me. These are tragic stories to be sure, but the four dead children and their dead mother do not inform my life in any important way. A father throwing his four kids off of a bridge doesn’t lead me to take any action or learn any lessons. They simply sadden me and shock me and make me shake my head in dismay.
So I couldn’t help wondering what pushed CNN.com’s editors to the point at which their seining of the day’s world news for publication resulted in this deathly detritus instead of real news that affects everyone.
I don’t believe that TV news could sustain such a high death ratio in its stories; national TV news tends toward broader stories with more national and international applicability.
Surely some of these tragedies would also be talked about on CNN and Headline News, but the broadcasts could not get by with having these stories comprise the majority of their programming.
But CNN.com, while global, really does serve a personal, what’s-interesting-to-me purpose. They can make it as trivial and tragic as they want, knowing that the few folks who want more substantive news can easily toggle over to another web browser instance. CNN.com knows that its readers want quick-hit 200 to 400 word articles about stuff that gives them a thrill.
That explains why web news and broadcast news CAN be so different. People expect different things from TV and the web. But what explains why the two ARE so different?
Simply put, death stories cause people to click. This is far more important, I think, than the tired old lament about the media gravitating toward bloody, sensational stories. For sites like CNN.com, this has come to truly represent their purpose; to not just provide news, but to provide tragic news, almost to the exclusion of other subjects.
CNN.com is a for-profit site generating advertising revenue off of its content while also cross promoting its broadcast ventures. Fine. The more clicks a story gets, the more profitable it is. Dandy. And apparently, the more tragic a headline is, the more prone viewers are to click it. Sad, but not surprising.
What is most pitiable about the situation is that the administrators of CNN.com surely have robust metrics to show PRECISELY which kinds of stories generate the most activity. I imagine the marketing folks with a sophisticated metrics dashboard at their disposal, allowing them to see associations between content and page hits in dozens of different ways. The editors are attuned to (and likely compensated directly for) posting as many of those stories as possible.
What this really tells me is that CNN.com has become what broadcast news wishes it could become. . . a revenue factory that is free (because of its format) to ride the far edge of sensationalism and tragedy to generate income instead of informing with actual news. Broadcast media doesn’t do this only because they can’t. Yet.
I hereby vow to use headlines as a screed to smooth out the concrete of my news consumption, pulling the news that I need to consume to the surface (for me to read) and making invisible those stories that are designed only to titillate and earn revenue. I will contribute to the bloodbath no longer.
Is this a big move on my part? Nope. Will it bring about any change? Nope.
But as Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”
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