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)