When does giving the reader what they want turn into clickbait? It’s complicated

gigaom reporting:
The outrage over clickbait is really just a symptom of the change from a one-way, broadcast model of journalism to one in which we actually know what readers want to read — and it’s not always what we think they should
The conventional wisdom is that clickbait is the bane of internet journalism, a kind of desperate pandering by revenue-challenged media companies aimed at racking up eyeballs — driven by the relentless economics of pageview-driven advertising. But what is it really? Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, and Facebook is even trying to ban it from the network, but defining it is harder than it seems. In fact, the dividing line between clickbait and serving the interests of the reader is a lot more blurry than the conventional wisdom suggests.
What got me thinking about this again was a Nieman Lab post by ethnographer Angèle Christin, who has been looking at the impact that audience metrics and analytics have had on digital journalism in the U.S. and France. Christin — a post-doctoral fellow at the New School for Social Research — spent two years observing and interviewing journalists and bloggers about analytics, and studying the way newsrooms are being changed by the web.
Many argue that an obsession with metrics has put journalists on a “hamster wheel” and driven the quality of online journalism to new depths (an argument I’ve tried to refute a number of times), to the point where some media outlets don’t even allow their writers to see the metrics related to their work, for fear of distorting their motives. But in many ways, “clickbait” is just a natural outgrowth of the evolution in journalism from a one-way broadcast approach to a two-way model — in other words, from push to pull, or from supply-driven to demand-driven.
...Has this transformation resulted in more clickbait and pandering? Undoubtedly it has. But it has also arguably resulted in more content that readers actually want to read, as opposed to producing reams of newspaper articles that no one ever makes it to the end of, just because some random editor thought it was important. And that’s probably a good thing.
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/29/when-does-giving-the-reader-what-they-want-turn-into-clickbait-its-complicated/?utm_source=GeneralUsers&utm_campaign=e5cc44aa23-c:mdad:08-30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-e5cc44aa23-99152541