Theres already been an enormous amount of ink spilled over the Facebook research study on emotion and social contagion -- and even more pixels devoted to it -- but I found a meta note of interest in John Hermanns introduction in this post: theawl/2014/06/this-social-network-changed-how-news-works-but-then-it-made-some-news-of-its-own He describes the study all of the outrage is based upon sat mostly unremarked as a news brief for two weeks, with early reports by the WSJ and New Scientists, before the A.V. Club wrote the headline that blew it up. It reminds me of a sarcastic remark (unattributed and, I think, unfounded) that the primary innovation in news in the past couple of years has been in headline writing, driven by Upworthy, Buzzfeed and the Everything you need to know about [x] style. It reminded me of Kashmir Hills sensational, instantly clickable headline at Forbes, pulling out a colorful detail from Charles Duhiggs terrific reporting that the drier hed from the Times (How Companies Learn Your Secrets) didnt capture. Decades after Mad Men and the boom in advertising after WWII, I wonder if great copywriting may now have even more value in todays chaotic news environment: if a media organization doesnt Gawkerize itself with a great headline and a concise, three paragraph summary of a long feature, they leave it open to any clever writer with a blog to do it better and reap the traffic that results.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 16:47:02 +0000