News, news and more news

Just wanted to write a blog post about watching the news 2022 style. There are so many news gathering organisations around the world. Quite a lot appears on YouTube. Sky, Euronews, France24 (from Paris), DW (from Berlin), Ariang (South Korea), CGTN (China), ABC (Australia), NBC (USA) and lots lots more. 

There are also journalistic articles written on newspaper sites around the world. Often requiring payment if you wish to access written articles by journalists. 

In Britain we also have the terrestrial channel the BBC which was one of the first to launch a 24 hour news channel in Britain, or the Island of Albion as it was first named by the Greek explorers. 

This was in the days before YouTube.

The streaming news channels all use the same method for disseminating the news. A number of rolling video reports, together with trailers for the channel. A few like France24 and India today, nicely allows chat. Which I think is a good thing. Allowing the audience to interact with the channel. 

The rolling video reports repeat throughout the day. They intersperse such reports with occasional presenters talking about any headlines that catch the presenters eye. 

I end up flicking from channel to channel. When a rolling video report repeats for the umpteenth time you know its time to change channels. 

One thing they often use is what is termed clickbait.

A new word to some which means content whose main purpose is to draw attention and be clicked on. 

For example many will show on the image for the channel at the moment "Live coverage of the War in Ukraine" you click on the image and find a report on Churchill and world war 2. Another example is you click on the link to the channel and a news reporter talking Hindi and shows images of India. This is called clickbait where it attracts people to click on the link to the channel. The content may or may not match the material that encouraged you to click on. It is annoying, and does not encourage you to click again.  Advertisers use this a lot on social media sites such as facebook and twitter. 

Another use of clickbait used in journalism is where you click on a link. The link then takes you to an article which you then have to make some payment in order to read the article.

Previous to this the phrase with similar properties was headline grabbing. A journalistic technique for selling newspapers. Grabbing your attention making you buy the newspaper. You read the article. You begin reading it and you realise it is some contrived article that mixes one note of fact and then adds a thousand random notes from the journalists imagination. You go then search the paper for the possibility of actually finding something of interest. Fail and fall back to doing the sudoku puzzle or crossword.