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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Mac News > Editorial: Mainstream press clickbait critical, Apple press annoyed

Editorial: Mainstream press clickbait critical, Apple press annoyed
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Jun 28, 2015, 01:29 PM
 
In the UK, it's known as Betteridge's law of journalism: a headline that is a question can always be answered by the reader by the word 'no' regardless of editorial intent. Is Elvis really alive? No. Could this one simple technique make you a millionaire overnight? Take a wild guess. While you're at it, apply your guess to CNBC's article that's been headlined: "Is interest in the Apple Watch dissipating?"

The article was written by Uptin Saiidi on CNBC.com and came off the back of a piece on CNBC's Power Lunch show. Headlines are not necessarily written by the same person who writes the article but it doesn't matter: nobody completely read the article, nobody truly and madly cares what the article says, and not even CNBC is all that fussed. Maybe Uptin's mother read it but otherwise the only thing that counted was the headline. That's what got clicks on the CNBC site, that's what is getting Power Lunch some coverage.

If you've never watched Power Lunch, CNBC says that it's a business show all about "any place where there's money to be made". If you do watch Power Lunch, perhaps you should stop -- the money being made here at least is through clickbait and nothing else. It's ostensibly CNBC's purpose to provide guidance in the complex world of business but it just isn't doing that here, at all.

Now, MacNN is an Apple news website: we like to think we criticise the company but if we really found all that many faults with it we'd be off doing something more interesting. Clearly, we're not SamsungNN or MicrosoftNN. Nonetheless, at the very least we are following Apple news intensely and CNBC could and should argue that it has the broader business picture in view. They certainly have the payroll to get somebody on who should know about things like this.

In one corner, then, CNBC: a cable news service, 26 years old, staffed by a "roster of top-notch digital and television journalists". In the other MacNN, an Apple news site, about 20 years old, staffed by people who can read.

We read the article, for instance. The article that leads with doom, builds to more doom-laden certainty, then spends its second half saying actually no, Apple's selling plenty. Just within the one article, this is sound and fury signifying nothing and backed up by less.

CNBC stated in the piece that "according to a new study by MBLM, a brand intimacy agency, millennials are dissatisfied with the watch... Many reported the original thrill of using it began to dissipate after 30 days... wearables are often notorious for having a high ditch-rate, with some people ditching them after an average of 60 days". The same journalism school that teaches you how to use Betteridge's law must have a semester on counting without using numbers and 'many' lectures on backing up assertions with barely related and unsubstantiated comments.

We didn't go to that school so we can't give you an actual number for 'many' but we can say that it's 11 or less.

This company surveyed 850 people and then interviewed 11 according to work by Apple Insider, of whom some number said something slightly less than gushing about their Apple Watches. Later in the CNBC piece, it's claimed that Apple has sold 5 million Watches. If all 11 people raged about how terrible the Watch is, if all not-even-a-dozen people jumped up and down on their watch to smash them, that leaves 4,999,989 people we don't know about.

It's not even as if MBLM is saying that statistics prove everybody hates the Watch with a margin of error of plus or minus 5 million people. MBLM is in the business of selling its information and right now we're in the business of needing aspirin but even taking the cop-out easy route of just reading their press release, it's strangely lacking in doom.

"The study found that users quickly developed a powerful personal bond with their Apple Watches," says paragraph one, "demonstrating that Apple's most intimate device delivers on all four documented forms of intimacy, including cognitive, emotional, physical and experiential. Users also felt a range of emotions, and in just one week of use, they changed some of their behaviors, like checking the iPhone less often and walking more as a result of the alerts on the watch."

In case you're wondering, paragraph two doesn't take a sharp dive into doom either. Nor does paragraph three. None of it does. So you might well read it all and conclude that people like their Apple Watch but then you're not a top-notch digital and television journalist looking to get people clicking.

Well done CNBC for getting some clicks and some buzz with the only cost being that the Mac press mocks them a little. However, mocking is catching. It's not only Apple fans or technology people who read Twitter, for instance, CNBC's business audience does too.

The business audience as a whole is interested in the news: livelihoods depend on news and livelihoods can depend on analysis. Clickbait gets you readers but when those readers are your sole audience and you are showing them you can't read nor count above 11, you're just aiming your guns at your feet.

"Will anyone take CNBC seriously?" would be a good Betteridge's law headline now too.

-William Gallagher (@WGallagher)
     
Gathurm
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Jun 28, 2015, 02:07 PM
 
I stopped following CNBC (or any other 'financial news' outlet, more than 3 years ago. In that period my investing has improved. That's what happens when you eliminate the noise. CNBC is a first class noise generator.
     
nowwhatareyoulookingat
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Jun 28, 2015, 02:31 PM
 
They didn't survey 850 people [according to AppleInsider], but rather "we have amassed over 850 open ended survey questions".
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Jun 28, 2015, 02:39 PM
 
They queried 850 people to cherry pick 11.
     
prl99
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Jun 28, 2015, 03:28 PM
 
"CNBC: a cable news service, 26 years old, staffed by a "roster of top-notch digital and television journalists"." Who determines if these digital and TV journalists actually know anything more than the top-notch journalists on Fox News? Anybody can be a journalist and these days there are plenty of journalists who have no business being journalists and have no understanding of anything they're journalizing about. Remember that managers don't have to understand the technical aspects of what they're managing, they just need to know how to manage people (a manager 3 levels above me actually said that). Journalist just need to know how to write, regardless of what they're writing about. Once people understand this and take everything journalists, and analysts for that matter, with a ton of salt, they will stop listening to them. Of course, in today's society, we have way too many (sheep) followers who refuse to research anything and simply listen to someone else (the me-to generation).
     
nowwhatareyoulookingat
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Jun 29, 2015, 03:47 AM
 
That's what CNBC claimed...but from the people who did the work: "That is not true. Mario Natarelli, a Managing Partner with MBLM, confirmed to AppleInsider that the study actually involved just 11 participants, noting that "we have amassed over 850 open ended survey questions and 40 hours of interview footage" from those users in a series of interviews conducted similar to a focus group"
     
Makosuke
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Jun 29, 2015, 01:53 PM
 
A better Bettridge corollary for the modern age would be simply "Any mainstream press article about Apple will contain an unreasonable number of hearsay, anecdotal, and highly subjective claims about Apple and/or its business and/or its products, and will draw a conclusion from these based entirely on the narrative being forwarded by the writer without any direct correlation to statistical or observable reality."

No, really, predicting the doom of Apple in the mainstream media has been going on for, oh, say, 20-some years of being wrong, and as Apple grew and got more successful and those predictions of impending doom failed to materialize over and over it turned into more of a bitter sniping game every time Apple stumbles for cheap eyeball attraction. They said mean things about Microsoft back in the day, of course, because it's always profitable to take a shot at the big dog, but there was never anywhere near the degree of "one bad quarter away from corporate collapse" narrative that exists with Apple.

Likewise, most journalists that say something positive or neutral about Apple aren't doing so from any position of evidence, they just happen to be throwing out random Apple verbiage of a different flavor.

Even (or rather, especially) tech journalists are famous for not getting Apple (and being angry about it when reality proves them wrong), but the mainstream media seems memorably clueless in a much less coherent way.

Maybe a better law would be a version of the old tech adage: "No journalist ever got fired for making up something about Apple."
     
   
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