Recently, I tried out a headline analyzer. You plunk in a headline for a blog post and the analyzer tells you whether it’s going to attract clicks. For example, the analysis says the headline needs, “more emotional words”. So, you write it again to improve the headline’s percentage score.
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“Whether you agree with it or not, what I do is an art form. The stuff that I write a lot of the time – I read it and I laugh at myself. It’s ridiculous.” ~Christopher Blair to the BBC about writing deliberately fake news. …
Of all the things that have come along with the campaign and Presidency of Donald Trump – gah, every time I say President Trump I feel my blood pressure rise – the most egregious in my opinion is the proliferation of fake news. …
At the suggestion of a former colleague, I listened to a podcast last week about a frightening new piece of technology. It scares me more than Kim Jong Un or Donald Trump with their tiny fingers hovering over their country’s big red buttons. …
A couple of weeks ago, The Toronto Star’s Public Editor nailed it in an editorial on an issue that’s been bugging me but I didn’t quite click the Lego pieces together as well as she did. The gist is this: there’s a misunderstanding about what fake news is. …
The Huffington Post conducted a fascinating experiment this week. They crafted an article with a deliberately false headline just to see how many people would share it without even reading it. Thousands did. …