Clickbait in sports journalism: click hunting policies on three Portuguese sites

Abstract

News headlines are short but complex informative elements, fundamental to hold the public's attention. In the digital context and a journalism in crisis, the attempt to deceive the audience to generate clicks from misleading titles, known as clickbait, represents a threat. This article qualitatively analyses 31 headlines with clickbait marks, selected after a first quantitative evaluation of 214 headlines originating from the three most popular online sports media in Portugal, the newspapers A Bola, Record and O Jogo. In the analysed sample, clickbait plays with the reader's curiosity through references that are only understandable by reading the news, which reduces the informative dimension of the headline alone. It also resorts to headlines with quotes without attribution (by text or image) to the authors of the direct speech, to the manipulation of statements and to the absence of the quotes highlighted in the headlines in the body of the news.