Study finds something that can’t be easily turned into clickbait

Confusion abounds today, after a ten-year scientific research program found something that can’t be oversimplified or easily turned into clickbait.

According to researchers at the Centre for Galactic Astrophysics, who have been looking into the nature of blackholes and how they interact with space-time, the results of their study, while incredibly important for the advancement of astrophysics as a science, cannot be easily turned into an image-heavy and arbitrarily-numbered list of things that will totally blow your mind or leave you speechless.

“We’ve been looking at the results, and we must say that we’re conflicted,” said Dr Theo Reece of the CGA. “I mean, the data really does change the way astrophysicists look at the complex equations and science of spatio-temporal interactions between objects of astounding mass, but when it comes to telling Buzzfeed readers that ‘These Scientists Have Been Researching Blackholes – And What They Found Will Completely Blow You Away’ we come up totally empty-handed. I mean, what good is scientific advancement if it can’t be completely reduced to an overly simplified misinterpretation for idiots to share on the ‘I Fucking Love Science’ Facebook page?”

CGA researchers now say that they are back at work searching for four more facts in their massive study that will fill a 10-item, 150-word listicle.

“It’s going to be a difficult task – like finding a needle in a haystack, or original content on Buzzfeed,” said Reece, “but we’re confident that, by early January at the latest, we’ll have found something dull and uninspired enough to get you through the last four points on the list so that you can read item 10 and do your obligatory reshare on Facebook and ‘lol’ comment.”

However, “writers” at the social media viral sites now say that they’ll probably just go ahead with the article anyway.

“We’ll just churn out the listicle anyway,” said Killean Jurnlizm, section editor for the sciences beat at the viral website. “I dunno, maybe there’s something on Reddit we can just steal and paste in… Besides, since when did our readers care about scientific accuracy anyway?”

Plagiarist unsure how to reword original content

An area journalist is reportedly unsure today, after meeting countless difficulties in rewording a rival website's news content while trying to make it look like his own original work.

“The world of cutting-edge journalism is a competitive and challenging place,” said 32-year-old part-time journalist and most-time “content aggregator” Robin Hartikles. “But nothing is more challenging than sitting there with another website’s content in front of you and a thesaurus in one hand trying to figure out how to balance synonyms with word replacement, phrase alterations and content mixing to make it seem like this is your own, fresh, original story that came solely as a result of your hard work.”

Hartikles explained why, unlike with images or photos on the internet – which are bloody easy to steal or pretend exist in the creative commons – written work still presents a challenge.

“There are so many possibilities, and doing it wrong means you’ll at the very least have to pretend that the source information is to blame,” he said. “What happens when there are specific words or a very specific vocabulary that makes for sentences that cannot be altered for fear of losing all the phrase’s meaning? This is why ‘curation’ or 'aggregation', as we call them in the business, are artforms unlike any other.”

This particular article – a series of photographs and accompanying descriptions pulled directly from a thread on a world renowned source of much free viral content known only as Reddit.com – is proving difficult, said Hartikles.

“What do I do? Do I reorder the words? Do I right-click the word in MS Word and choose from a readily available list of synonyms? Do I find other sources and blend the two to make it seem like this is original thought? It’s such a tough decision. All I can say is thank GOD for all that practice I got with Turn It In and my university essays.”

Whatever his choice, Hartikles is steadfast that he can never stoop to citing original sources.

“Have you ever read an article that says ‘reported The Sunday Times last week’ or ‘according to an article by The City Press,” he asked. “Admitting that I got all my information from another websites’ hard work would make me look like a journalist who is lazy, unethical and unprofessional.”

He added that “citing source material is also so much work”.

“It’s bad enough that I have to jump through more hoops than a trained circus animal to credit photographers for their images,” he explained, adding that by “credit” he meant “neglect to include any and all relevant information that might lead to the original photographer getting any site visits, advertising revenue, or even exposure, that beloved bread and butter of artists everywhere.

Hartikles was quick to refute colleagues claims that he is “a low life scum-sucking bottomfeeder mooching off the sweat and blood of real journlists” saying that he has totally had original thoughts before.

“For example, I came up with the new word that describes the new journalists of the future,” he explained. “A Plag-ournalist.”

Readers wanting to know more about this story can read it in slightly different wording and with my name in tiny letters at the bottom on any other news website in the world, except Buzzfeed, because they've closed down their website.

Pic: Bill Branson, for National Cancer Institute (Creative Commons - public domain)

Buzzfeed apologises for endless stream of shallow, un-lifechanging garbage

Citing the endless stream of failed attempts to “blow your mind”, “change your life”, “make you weep” and other such hyperbolic click-baitery, the chief editor and long-time writer at viral media website and “content aggregator” Buzzfeed has this morning issued a long and heartfelt apology to the internet, people who originally made the content they so brazenly “aggregate”, and the world in general.

“We just want to say we’re so damn sorry,” said editor Plaie Gerize. “Looking back at our long and ugly history of hyperbole, exaggeration and outright lies, we want to wholeheartedly apologise.”

Gerize’s list of apologies was long.

“We’re sorry. We know that Picture Number 8 didn’t blow your mind. We know Number 6 wasn’t perfect, as we said it would be in countless articles,” he said, permanently deleting the entire website in a show of ultimate contrition and sorrow. “Those fabulous snaps of Jennifer Lawrence didn’t prove that she was perfection, and that series of photos that was supposed to restore your faith in humanity was completely inadequate. We're scum. We're cancer. And we’re sorry. We can’t say that enough.”

Pictured: the new Buzzfeed website, with all relevant changes.

His apology extended to all the content that the Buzzfeed team as a whole –regardless of country or origin or format – had produced.

“Even our videos. When they weren’t silly or ham-fistedly trying to send an self-evident life-lesson, they were just totally trivial. Also, time and time again we totally blew down the importance of individual people’s hard work and passion by never using their name and just reducing them to their sex, nationality or even just ‘someone’. We should have given them due respect, even if it is hard to get a click out of you by using someone’s full name.”

He continued.

“We’re also sorry for having outright stolen content from many sites. Sorry, ‘aggregated’. Or maybe ‘curated’? I dunno, which word are we using these days?”

“Furthermore, we’re sorry about contradicting articles that provide you with reasons why each member of your favourite boyband or series is the best one. Like those twenty articles which individually claimed why different members of Friends or One Direction or The Backstreet Boy or whatever were by far the best. I mean, how did we not see how black our souls were, posting these kinds of articles at the same time and having each written by the same author? How could we have been so spineless as to not have an editorial stance on anything?”

“Finally, we’re sorry for using social issues and controversial topics to squeeze a few cheap clicks out of you. Like videos where we show people giving homeless people a pizza or a hundred dollars in a video that probably makes eighteen times that, or with serious issues that don’t deserve to be trivialised in shallow, bullet-point, GIF-heavy listicles.”

Having realised their errors, editors and writers at the website have since vowed to take courses in ethics and journalistic values, and have furthermore vowed to never oversimplify an argument or concept by using cat pictures or images cut from popular culture.

“We realise now that our insatiable hunger to just get that click out of you, to bleed you and other readers for pageviews and time, made us blind,” he said in a long, profound, ten-chapter essay that didn’t contain one picture or numerical bulletpoint. “It turned us into monsters, veritable scum-sucking bottom feeders who lurked on Reddit and subReddit forums and Tumblr pages, copy-pasting and rehashing and resharing old and boring content because we knew that, hell, you’d click whatever old shit we regurgitate.”

The move has been met by widespread praise.

"Their apology was amazing, incredibly. It literally blew my mind and changed my life," said one internet user. "In fact, if there was a list of 10 apologies published on the internet somewhere, this would probably be at number 4."

Those wanting to know more about this story can read this exact same article on The Huffington Post, Upworthy and Elitedaily.