Journalism: Online headlines shift from concise to click-worthy
International study finds profound changes in the style of digital journalism
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
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International study finds profound changes in the style of digital journalism
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The researchers liken the internet to a huge marketplace where journalists use headlines to compete for readers’ attention. Attention is a precious commodity in the digital age, as content can be produced more cheaply than ever before—resulting in an oversupply and fierce competition to engage readers’ interest.
Headlines play a crucial role in drawing readers in. They need to grab attention and arouse curiosity. Unlike print headlines, the success of each individual online headline can be measured in terms of the number of clicks it receives. The researchers argue that this leads to online headlines being worded to generate as many clicks as possible, effectively becoming clickbait.
“Our analysis shows that the language of online headlines has changed systematically over the years,” says lead author Pietro Nickl, a predoctoral fellow in the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “Many of these changes indicate that they are being adapted to the new affordances and pressures of the digital environment.”
Online news headlines have changed markedly in the last 20 years
The analysis focused on linguistic and structural changes in headlines since 2000. These changes reflect not only changes in editorial practice, but also the growing importance of headlines as a key element in the digital competition for attention. Unlike in print journalism, where headlines primarily need to be clear and concise, online headlines are used strategically to generate clicks. Clickbait headlines are characterized by their length: They are written in a conversational tone and serve to arouse curiosity without revealing much information. In fact, the researchers found that the average length of headlines has increased continuously over time. They also observed an increased use of linguistic devices typically associated with clickbait. These include active verbs, the use of pronouns such as “I,” “you,” or “they,” and a higher frequency of question words (“how,” “what,” “why”). These elements arouse curiosity by creating an information gap that readers can only bridge by clicking to open the article.
Another notable finding concerns sentence structure. While noun phrases such as “Earthquake in Myanmar” were common in the early 2000s, full sentences later became more popular. Full-sentence headlines are more dynamic and emotional, often narrative in structure, and appeal more strongly to the emotions.
The shift in emotional tone was also striking. Sentiment analysis showed that headlines have become more negative on average, across both high-quality and tabloid journalism. Interestingly, right-wing media outlets used headlines with negative connotations significantly more often than left-wing or politically neutral ones.
Developments reinforced by algorithms
“The changes are not the result of individual editorial decisions, but reflect a process of cultural selection. Specific linguistic features prevail because they are more successful under the conditions of the digital attention economy. They are used more and more frequently—sometimes without the people who produce or consume them even being aware of what is happening,” says Pietro Nickl. This whole development is reinforced by social media recommendation algorithms.
The study is based on data from four international news outlets—The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times of India, and ABC News Australia—as well as the comprehensive News on the Web corpus (NOW), which contains some 30 million additional headlines from various countries. In addition, data from Upworthy (as a prime example of clickbait style) and from a corpus of scientific preprints (as a counterexample) were analyzed. Over time, the news headlines became increasingly similar to the clickbait titles on most variables considered. Data analysis was conducted using modern natural language processing methods such as sentiment analysis, syntactic analysis, and dictionary-based counting.
Manipulative content is getting harder to detect
The results also raise fundamental social questions. The increasing prevalence of clickbait style in traditional media could, in the long term, undermine trust in journalism and make it more difficult to distinguish between reputable and manipulative content. Many linguistic features that were previously red flags for clickbait or manipulative content—such as overly emotional language or heavy use of pronouns and question words—are now also common in quality media. “If the style of established media increasingly resembles that of problematic sources, the boundaries become blurred—which makes it more difficult to distinguish between serious and manipulative content,” warns co-author Philipp-Lorenz Spreen, research scientist in the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Need for changes in platform design
The researchers nevertheless see opportunities for action by shaping the digital information landscape. If metrics such as click-through rates or time on page have adverse effects on content, it is time to think about alternative metrics. The first platforms are already experimenting with new approaches—one emerging metric is “deeply read” content, which focuses on how thoroughly users engage with articles rather than just the number of clicks. In the long term, individually selectable criteria could also help to promote a more diverse and sustainable media landscape.
In brief:
- Online news headlines have become longer and more negative.
- They tend to use clickbait style to attract attention.
- This development can be observed across news outlets, regardless of journalistic quality.
- Potential reasons include the sinking production costs of online publications, a general change in style, or the more competitive online environment.
Journal
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
The evolution of online news headlines
