Bad news sells. Is social media changing this?
February 12th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe
This week I caught an interview with Alastair Campbell on ITV’s Loose Women, promoting his new book Maya. Within the interview Campbell (who formerly wrote for the Daily Mirror) suggested that social networking is inverting the core principle of newspaper journalism, i.e. bad news sells, and replacing it with a more balanced view of the world.
In my view he’s right. Traditionally we might have bought our favourite tabloid or broadsheet on the way to work, or selected the paper with the most grabbing front page headline. Pre-social media, we’d have been blissfully unaware of how our intake of news was being controlled by an editorial agenda that dictates bad news sells. Journalists are trained in how to tease out of any story an angle that conveys fear, sex, drama etc. A story that simply reports ‘good news’ would never get past any half-decent news editor.
Today however, ’social’ media means that we have access to news that has not been written by journalists or broadcasters. Many high profile bloggers have no journalist training, and so take a much fresher, unbiased approach to news reporting.
Websites such as Delicious and Digg enable people to bookmark and share content from the highest profile blog through to the most obscure and niche. It’s human nature to want to share good news, and so with no motivation to ’sell’, those consuming news through social sites are likely to be faced with more ‘good’ news that then would have been traditionally.
This is good news for brands and the PR industry as a whole. It makes it more possible for a brand to communicate its good news, and if it is liked by its community, the news will be shared. This doesn’t remove the need for a strong news hook, but that hook can now be a positive one.
Tags: alastair campbell, delicious, digg, Journalism, loose women, News, newspapers
February 12th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
It’s an interesting theory Wendy, but not totally sure it holds up.
There is a reason why bad news sells - the public like reading about it. And you only have to look at the recent ‘bad news’ stories that rocketed through the social web to see that this is the case online too (John Terry et. al.).
I also think that rather than being unbiased, you find that most bloggers are likely more biased than trad journalists. Yes, they might offer a counter view, but this is likely to be fueled more closely by their own experiences.
I don’t think any of this is necessarily bad, it’s just the way it is.
Recent stats also suggest that c.80% of content that is circulated or created on the social web took its original source from a traditional news outlet.
February 12th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Wendy
Interesting post.
While I agree with you that bad news is the time-worn formula for the mainstream media, I don’t think bloggers are necessarily benign targets for PR people to bombard with “good” news.
Regardless of formal training, if a blogger becomes influential enough to attract the attention of the PR industry, I believe that blogger will start to behave like a publisher/editor and exercise their own brand of quality control. Though it might not involve an emphasis on “bad” news, it will certainly emphasise relevance.
And where the journalist of yesteryear may have grumbled when receiving irrelevant, PR puff, the blogger has the facility to grumble while naming and shaming the PR offender online.
So, yes, bloggers are different, but any blog worth being on will have standards.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Thanks Danny and Jon for very insightful comments.
It’s by no means a fully formed theory and you make good points about bloggers.
I’m not disputing that bad news sells, but suggesting that we now have a more balanced view of the world’s news available to us.
Ever the optimist, my thinking is merely that people are chosing to read more good news nowadays than they might have been able to prior to social media.
February 17th, 2010 at 2:47 am
I would say that social media sites do affect the news. Bad publicity is better than no publicity.