Let’s imagine you are a journalist for USA Today, and you get word that a YouTuber using the handle A.J.DoubleU (reportedly an Arizona local named Alec Wysopal) has found a prehistoric bone near North Craycroft Road and East River Road in Tucson, and that the University of Arizona’s Anthropology Department is taking the lead researching this minor archeological find.

Let’s imagine, further, a spokesperson for the Tucson Police Department quickly issues the following statement: “This will be a prehistoric anthropological investigation. This is not a criminal investigation.”

Let’s further imagine that this prehistoric bone was found nearly ten miles from the home of the still-missing Nancy Guthrie.  

What would your headline be? 

Would it be: Human remains found near Nancy Guthrie’s home. What police say?

What picture would you use to illustrate the story. A prehistoric human? The prehistoric bone itself? Or a heartbreaking photo of Nancy Guthrie with her famous daughter? 

Would you trumpet the headline, with the heartbreaking image, all over the web, so that millions of readers would see it and become alarmed at what they will believe is Nancy Guthrie’s death? And so that AOL might put the misleading headline on its landing page, resulting in millions more clicks? 

You probably would not do anything like that, would you? Because that would be unethical. 

But that’s what USA Today did, of course. 

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SOME OF US studied journalism and know this fundamental rule of headline-writing: “Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.”

So if you have a story about the discovery of a prehistoric bone, and it has nothing to do with a celebrity’s kidnapped mother, don’t imply in your headline that it has something to do with a celebrity’s kidnapped mother. 

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THERE IS A REASON that USA Today does this. As we noted in an earlier article about an equally misleading (but much less heartless) piece of clickbait from CBS News, a legacy news organization like USA Today no longer makes most of its money from print advertisements and subscriptions; instead, it needs to rely on clickbait, little enticing thumbnails that you see at the corner of your computer screen when you are trying to get something else done, which encourage you to click on a link. 

When you click, the website makes money; it makes more money the longer you stay on it. More clicks mean more site visitors, which translates to higher ad rates. Readers who on average spend more time on a website lead to even higher ad rates. 

So in the old days, if you were staying at a motel, you’d pick up your free copy of USA Today outside your door, and you’d flip through it while you ate the motel’s breakfast buffet. The headlines told you what the story was actually about; you could read the stories that you were interested in and ignore those you didn’t care about. The articles didn’t need to lure you in; you were already holding the newspaper in your hands; the motel had paid for the subscription. You would see the ads as you flipped through the paper. No one needed to mislead to make money. 

The clickbait websites have a different incentive, which means they have to do what it takes to get you to click, even if that means misleading you. 

The number of readers interested in hearing the latest on Nancy Guthrie is no doubt much higher than those who want to read about the discovery of a minor prehistoric bone. Unfortunately, that’s what the article was about, and that’s what the headline should have said. 

But there’s no money in integrity. 

^^^

Editor’s note: the original article about the prehistoric bone appeared in the Arizona Daily Star, under the headline, Bone discovery not linked to Guthrie case, which does what a headline is supposed to do. When the national bastards picked it up, they monetized it ruthlessly and misleadingly. 

Steven S. Drachman, who wrote this article, is a novelist.