Clickbait headlines are meant to get you to engage with your story not give your audience a heart attack

 · July 19 2024, 10:00
Clickbait headlines are meant to get you to engage with your story not give your audience a heart attack
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The most exhausting part of being a writer solely focused on Newcastle United is reading through all the negativity that's out there, and there is a lot.

By negativity I mean anything from a potential sale of a popular player or missing out on a transfer target right up to fan overreaction to a defeat and the rift that often causes in the fanbase. It comes from all corners of the internet, but the most draining is reading the negativity pedalled by the mainstream media.

It can come across like there's an agenda against the idea of Newcastle United doing well and some outlets seem to go out of their way to publish negative stories, sometimes journalists will run stories that even they know don't make sense because they know the content will generate engagement - bad news get a lot more interest than good, it's how we're wired.

A lot of the time you can see through the facade. We all have certain journalists we simply disregard as soon as we see their name attached to an article, but sometimes they will craft a nice headline that just piques your curiosity and you can't help yourself.

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Eddie Howe will hopefully end the England speculation later today

Ben Crawford of The Mirror almost gave me a heart attack

Today, though, The Mirror have gone for a different approach to clickbait and they almost killed me off.

I'm not a healthy man, and I have to be careful but this one headline today almost took me off the map:

"Eddie Howe gets England offer, Alexander Isak joins Arsenal – Newcastle's nightmare summer"

I mean, steady on! Obviously by the time you get to the end of the headline, it's clear that it's just an opinion piece outlining Newcastle's worst-case scenario this summer, but I could have pegged out by that point.

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Let's focus on the positives

Things have been rocky enough for Newcastle this summer with all the speculation around Alexander Isak, Bruno Guimaraes and Anthony Gordon. Not to mention the fact that Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi left the club and are now looking at putting half a billion pounds into Tottenham Hotspur.

We don't need this Eddie Howe nonsense or to still be thinking about Isak going to Arsenal.

What we need is to ride that wave of positivity that's come back over the club after the launch of the Adidas gear, the arrival of Paul Mitchell and the potential we have laid out ahead of us and hopefully later today we'll hear Eddie Howe rule himself out of the England job so we can get on with our lives.

LET'S GO!

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