Listicles vs. Journalism: Mashable's Jim Roberts Talks Apocalypsticles
At Social Media Week NYC, our sister blog SocialTimes caught up with some notable digital journalists at a panel hosted by The Wall Street Journal. The panelists weighed in on a piece in Politico that criticized certain web-based publications for turning violence into clickbait:
The Kyiv protests were also starting to look like clickbait. By the end of the day on Wednesday, Business Insider, Talking Points Memo, Buzzfeed and Mashable had all published their own listicle versions of what Huffington Post called “Ukraine Crisis: 12 Apocalyptic Pictures After Nation’s Deadliest Day.” High in resolution, low on explanation, the articles painted Ukraine’s carnage by numbers.
A new genre had been born: the apocalypsticle.
“I was outraged by [the Politico piece]… It bothered me personally because I had invested a lot of real dollars in covering that story since December,” said Mashable’s executive editor and chief content officer Jim Roberts at the panel.
Here, he talks more about the publication’s coverage of the crisis:
However, Sarah Kendzior, the writer of that article, thinks that investing in the story as a publication does not justify the ‘apocalypsticles’: “Every website puts out good content and bad content, and you cannot defend the bad content by pointing out that good content exists elsewhere on the site.”
For more, head to our sister site SocialTimes.
