By Alex Fink

The news business is broken. 

Here is a small assortment of headlines from the past 2 years to illustrate the problem:

1. “14-year-old girl stabbed her little sister 40 times, police say. The reason why will shock you.”
2. “One-fifth of this occupation has a serious drinking problem”
3. “Hitler created the largest gun ever, and it was a total disaster”
4. “How to trick your brain to work faster?”
5. “Why is the camel toe not fashionable?”

Note that these headlines are not accidentally bad. They’re intentional. They sensationalize something trivial in an attempt to make you click on them. 

Why would any self-respecting news outlet publish such headlines? 

The reason why will shock you.

How we got here

Newspapers first appeared in North America in the 1700s, and for the first 200 years they were primarily an intra-party affair. The target audience was educated elites and party loyalists, and the content was overtly partisan.

Nearly two centuries later the daily newspaper was born, and suddenly people could buy a single issue that attracted their attention with no strings attached. 

Suddenly, news outlets had to compete for attention instead of writing for a captive audience. 

“Special! Special! Read All About It!”.

And thus, the attention-grabbing headline was born. Luckily, only one headline in the entire newspaper was loud and attention-grabbing; the rest could still be news. But the seed was sown, and the yellow press was born.

In the 1940s, the New York Times managed to temporarily reverse the trend by introducing the subscription-only newspaper. But another half a century passed, and now the industry encountered a tidal wave unlike any other – The Internet.

On the internet, content was free. Any reader had access to any written material. Ads were the only viable option for monetizing one’s content.

The attention-grabbing paradigm

The vast majority of content competes against all other content all the time. There is no “issue” or “paper” in which multiple items get packaged together. People consume the news by clicking on the headline that shouts the loudest, and as they skim through the article they view ads. 

The ads pay per click, or per view.

And that – more than anything else – is causing major news publishers to mimic what the yellow press has done since the 1890s. 

In case you are still wondering who authored the headlines I listed at the head of this article, in order, they are from:

1. CNN Breaking News.
2. The Washington Post.
3. Business Insider.
4. BBC.
5. The Times.

This is the world we live in. 

Business Insider brings you the latest news about Hitler’s guns, only to be outdone by The Times’ timely piece about camel toes.

How can we reverse course?

If information is nourishment for the brain, then our approach to it should likely resemble how we approach other forms of nourishment. 

So ask yourself – how do you go about consuming less unhealthy foods in your diet? 

My own answer to this question included three items:

1. Shop in grocery stores that carry higher-quality products.
2. Shop primarily in the perimeter aisles where healthier foods tend to be.
3. Look at the nutrition label on each product before deciding whether to buy it or not.

I founded the Otherweb to help people apply the same three methods to the information they consume. Here’s what it does: 

• Gather articles from hundreds of sources. 
• Use a suite of AI models to filter out as much junk as it can. There’s plenty of content out there, so when in doubt – throw it out.
• Replace all headlines with a 1-sentence summary that actually reflects what the article says – so there’s no more clickbait or attention-grabbing headlines. 
• Attach a nutrition label to each article, so you can decide whether it’s worth consuming before you consume it.

These methods aren’t perfect by any means, but they give readers at least one place where they can read the news without the noise. 

Hope for the future

I want to wrap things up on a positive note. As my experience at the Otherweb shows, it is possible to modify the incentives of news publishers and nudge them towards producing better content over time. 

Artificial intelligence has its downsides, but its upsides are also undeniable. There is no better tool for tackling repetitive tasks at scale. There is no better way to moderate content while keeping your models and datasets open for public review. 

Hopefully, readers will vote with their feet and choose the healthy option over the dopamine rush offered by most existing platforms.

If they do, I believe we can create a world in which journalistic integrity is rewarded and not viewed as a drag on the bottom line.

TIME BUSINESS NEWS