One of the great wins of the digital age, as far as I’m concerned, is my ability to cherry-pick the news that’s important to me and have access to it around the clock. Since I spent a great deal of my childhood having to wait until 6:30 and the dinner hour in order to find out from Walter Cronkite what went on during the twenty-four hours before—and having it be (in my memory) a grim and unrelenting processions of Vietnam, assassinations, Watergate, and plane hijackings—I’ve got enough perspective to marvel.
So now, in the mornings or after lunch or right before bed, I’ll fire up one of my RSS readers and catch up on the news that’s important to me. Technology news. Science headlines. Theater gossip. Releases of new board games. Recipes from Cakespy. Book reviews. None of that distressing, distracting political nonsense, none of that downer news o’ the world. Just the blinkered subset I enjoy as I munch on a breakfast made from genetically-altered foodstuffs as I bask in the warm glow of an electronic device manufactured by those disgruntled ingrates at Foxconn.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself unhappy with a certain kind of pandering approach various of my long-term sites have been taking. They’ll compose the most incendiary and headlines ever, and then follow through with stories that are spectacularly mundane, or else just plain idiotic—all to garner follow-through clicks from readers.
One that I used to read because it was a fairly reliable source for both interesting scientific stories and Doctor Who-related rumors started posting, over the course of a few months, all kinds of stories about zombie apocalypse. How one could theoretically start. How quickly a zombie apocalypse could spread. What supplies would be best to have on hand in case of a zombie apocalypse. What cities would likely be zombified first.
At first I thought it was pretty amusing that a bunch of nerds who spent the day watching Warehouse 13 reruns while typing out 1300-word stories on spec were seriously assuming that they’d be the survivors of any kind of apocalypse—much less one that required being able to run and clamber any higher than it typically took them to reach for the frozen Hot Pockets. But then I just got tired of not knowing whether the so-called ‘scientific’ headline on which I was about to click was going to lead to a real news story, or one of their paranoid zombie fantasies, and I quietly dropped them from my feed.
Gizmodo was a site I read for years until I unceremoniously dumped it not that long ago. Although years back it used to be a fairly reliable source of tech news, it’s had a long and steady decline into sensationalism that’s been sad to watch. First they started following the trend of posting as gospel truth any back-fence talk that they picked up out of some badly-translated Japanese industry rumor rag. Then, as Apple’s fortunes grew, they hit upon the tactic of posting any kind of outrageous headlines they could with that company’s name in it, so that any reader who saw Does Apple Really Test iPhone Toxins on Helpless Baby Kittens?! and, thinking whaaat? to himself, clicked through, would be confronted with a story that blandly didn’t mention any kind of felines or torture at all.
Then Gizmodo got involved in a scandal of their own making a while back when they purchased a pre-release iPhone that an Apple engineer had accidentally left in a bar. When Apple got the LAPD involved and barred the site from its press events after, the editors acted like they were the company’s creepy schizo stalker ex-boyfriend, alternately sucking up to the company with sycophantic love-fests, begging Hey girl, get back with me and I promise to treat you right!, or turning around and bashing Apple for not putting out because obviously it was frigid, and probably a lesbo. I got tired of the antics and deleted their feed, too.
Both those sites earned my apathy over time. There’s one news source I’d been dubious about for some time—a site oriented toward time and effort-saving techniques that would give my life more leisure and peace of mind. I’d subscribed to it years ago because it carried useful articles about how to pack efficiently for a vacation, or how to iron a shirt more quickly and with fewer wrinkles, or how to fold a fitted sheet squarely. (I still haven’t learned the last. I’ve gotten to the point I just shove the fitted sheets into the cupboard in a wad and pray I never have overnight company.)
Sure, this site obsessed quite a bit on the GTD—Getting Things Done—system, which is one of those highly-organized and methodical ways of organizing your To-Do list so that you’re spending more time writing weekly, monthly, yearly, and five-yearly goals and organizing your To-Do list than actually, you know, getting anything done. But I could skip those articles.
I could not, however, avoid the article with this headline: Store Credit Cards in Peanut Butter to Avoid Impulse Shopping. I saw that and, just as they intended I should, thought Whaaaaaat?, and clicked on through to a story that indeed, as the headlines indicated, recommended shoving one’s credit cards into a full jar of peanut butter so that one wouldn’t be tempted to use them frivolously. Not, you know, put them in a safety deposit box, or at the back of a drawer, or in a piggy bank. Not give them to a loved one with the instructions to hide them. Not get rid of them altogether, if they’re that big a temptation.
Nope. Store them in a freakin’ jar of peanut butter.
That was the day—the exact moment—I removed that particular site from my feeds forever.
Here’s the thing. Yellow journalism is yellow journalism, whether it’s in the newspapers or on the web. Regurgitated rumors don’t hold any attraction for me. Neither do pseudoscience and speculation. Outrageous headlines might attract my curiosity, but when I click through and see something inane or inflammatory behind them—or something that’s just plain inane—it’s just going to make me wary of a site. Jerk with me often enough, and I’d be more likely to stick my credit cards in peanut butter than visit them again.
And I’m sure as heck not going to do that.
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