Where Clicks Reign, Audience Is King

Early in August, a lion known as Cecil was killed by a hunter near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The phrase “Cecil the lion” now returns about 3.2 million Google News results. More than 2,100 articles had been posted to Facebook by mid-August, according to data from the social media tracking firm CrowdTangle, where they were shared about 3.6 million times, and liked 1.3 million times. According to Twitter, mentions of Cecil peaked at nearly 900 tweets a minute, for a total of more than three million. The effect, for online readers, was inundation. And it was far from the first time. Recent stories about Rachel Dolezal, a woman who was born to white parents but came to identify herself as black and lead an NAACP chapter, and a dress that appeared different colors to different people have spawned their own mini-industries.

Since the days when most major cities supported multiple newspapers, the news media has long been subject to groupthink, and prone to search for sensation. But as more readers move toward online social networks, and as publishers desperately seek scale to bring in revenue, many have deplored a race toward repetitive, trivial journalism, so noisy that it drowns out more considered work.