Pretend This Is Clever

Every year on my birthday I write about some life lesson I have learned in the past 12 months. Unfortunately, you may have noticed that none of those life lessons involved catching on to the fact that when the news does a late-afternoon tease about some story which will be airing on the 11 o'clock news it will never live up to the hype. Seriously, I fall for it almost every time. I'm sure you know exactly what I am talking about. They come on with an ominous-sounding voice-over making a vague statement about something in your house which could potentially kill you. What is it? Well, to find out you have to tune it at 11... which is when you discover it is something very obvious and not a danger to people who can read and have common sense, such as the product in question being Drain-O that will kill you and even then it will only happen if you drink the entire jug of it and don't call for help. Not only is that not breaking news, you can argue that it doesn't even qualify as news since the story hasn't happened to anyone so far. This is always how the majority of these stories end up and yet I keep finding myself tuning in, just on the off chance today is the one time it turns out to be an important story.

I'm no better when it comes to headlines on the internet. I'm constantly clicking on articles and falling down the rabbit hole that is the internet because of an interesting headline. Actually, the internet may be even worse than a traditional newspapers because while newspapers need you to be intrigue enough to buy the paper, the internet only needs to keep your attention for the five seconds it takes for a page to load. Thus, headlines are designed to be as sensational as possible to draw you in and they don't even have to connect to the story. As if to prove this point, most writers aren't even allowed to write their own headlines, as the majority of publishing companies have a group of people whose only job it is to come up with a phrase which will intrigue you enough to click over and at least read the first headline. Think about it like this - the article writers are a blog post, the headline writers are Twitter. (Yet article writers are always getting in trouble for what their headline says because the headline writers don't put their name on it.) They really don't need you to stick around and read the article, just count as a pageview. I know all of these facts, which is why I was extra mad at myself last night when I came across and article and couldn't help myself from clicking on it. The headline read: "Too much tea causes unusual bone disease."

Before I clicked I was certain this story had to involve an extreme circumstance. I mean, tea is as old as time and if resulted in a serious health condition we would have heard about it before now. Still, I begin every morning with a bowl-sized cup of tea which I allow to steep for a while beforehand, so that nagging part of my brain kept poking at me, saying "Better read the article just to make sure it doesn't apply to you." Plus, we all know how fickle the medical community is - what is the cornerstone of a healthy diet today is the very thing which will cause you to drop dead tomorrow. So, I opened up the website and discovered the story was about a 47 year-old Michigan woman who had contracted a very rare form of bone cancer which researchers claim could be tied back to the fact that she had been drinking a pitcher of tea made from at least 100 tea bags every day for 17 years. [Sidebar: Seriously? I would love to talk to this woman and ask if any part of that felt right to her. I enjoy a nice cup of tea as much as the next fellow, but even I couldn't drink a pitcher of it. Also, 100 tea bags? How big was this pitcher?] Once again, the shocking news was essentially that gorging yourself on a product for an extended period of time is not good for you. I can't imagine this safety tip applied to anyone other than that one woman.

In some ways I guess the fact I fell for a sensationalized headline again shouldn't be considered shocking news either. Also, I can't exactly feel like I am the victim of a scam because I do the exact same thing when I am writing headlines for my blog post. (I rationalize it by saying at least one readers get here I try to give them better content.) Sadly, this is just going to continue because it is not like the internet puts a premium on quality content. The only thing I have working in my favor are things like Google's preview feature which let you get an image of the page without actually having to go there and that is usually good enough to read the first few lines of the story. I may still be interested enough to mouse over and see what the story is about, but at least now the website won't get credit for a pageview. It is the smallest of victories, but if enough people do that it may just remind a few websites that the only way to build a truly loyal fanbase is to actual provide a useful service and not just trick them into looking at your site for five seconds every few days. Then again, expecting high standards from random internet sites happens so rarely that seeing it occur would probably cause you to spill your entire pitcher of tea in surprise.