A New Phenomenon of Journalism

The term “new yellow journalists” is not familiar for most of us, readers even though almost every day we come across their writings. There is a frank “confession” in the article about two graduates of the University of Tennessee, who found out how to make fast and easy money on the Internet. This new phenomenon is very interesting, but requires to browse more information, the historical path, and the reason why news that was made by these new writers became so catchy and popular. Below are founds that explain some intriguing facts.

Most of the time on the news we can see terrible and depressing events that spreads around really fast compared to positive ones. The writers see it and use it to their purpose. This effect causes a depressing slant and indicates that sudden disaster is more compelling than slow improvements. By saying otherwise, we, readers encouraged journalists to focus on negative news.

The evidence for it is an experiment by Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, at McGill University in Canada. This experiment is valid because they said to the participants this study focuses on eye tracking and nothing about the real purpose. The results of the research are identically depressing as the stories that were read by participants. They chose pieces of news about corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy, but very few about topics with pleasant words. Even though, these people said they preferred good news. This experiment is evidence of our collective hunger to hear and remember bad news (“negative bias”- psychological term).

So why people are being persuaded by materials that cause them to think “what is that? I got to click”, as said Wade from our class article? Because we have evolved to react fast to potential threats. We tend to react on violence, chaos and aggressive wording because for us it is a signal that we need to change what we are doing to avoid danger.

More than half of us get our news from social media. Because of this many companies started using Facebook and Twitter and others to get financial news to investors. Of course, these companies also use social media to disseminate bad news. Interesting information was found on the article When Companies Tweet, Investors Listen,

 “When tweets contained good news, trading volume was lower, as was the bid–ask spread. This shows that the asking price was in line with what buyers were willing to pay, which generally means that investors are comfortable with the stock price. The opposite was true when bad news was tweeted out. And, as that bad news was retweeted again and again, the bid–ask discrepancy got bigger and trading volume increased, showing unease among investors.”

Therefore, it is helpful to know about these new phenomena that develop within general development of our society. Learning about it would protect us from manipulation on Internet, TV, and other sources. Do not let journalists who use tricks to make you click on the bottom make easy, fast money.