[abathur]

You do realize the reporters didn't go to journalism school because they dream of churning out clickbait for a living, yeah? I'm sure the vast majority of them would rather be paid to do nothing than to generate clickbait, too. (Or, you know, be paid to challenge the powerful.)

In 2003--my freshman year in college--I worked for the online desk at my hometown newspaper. I worked overnight. Once the print paper was ready, I reviewed and massaged automatically-converted copies of the for-print layout to ensure they were ready to publish online and manually pulled them from the quark files if they weren't. Our online desk was in one corner of a cavernous newsroom with scores and scores of desks, between the compositor and the sports desk.

There were more sports reporters working the desk next to me in 2003 than the total number of reporters left at the entire paper now. The industry is a husk.