I don’t think that’s the case, because the journalist you are speaking to is not the person who’s makes the decision.
At the moment you have some person who’s trained to write headlines so that the headlines get a maximum of clicks and who writes headlines for a lot of articles.
If the management of the New York Times has to decide whether they are willing to get 20% less clicks on social media when they let a journalists instead of their current headline writers write the headlines, just so that people on LessWrong are more willing to give the New York Times interviews, I don’t think that will change their management decisions.
Shaming the New York Times for misinformation might work better. You could write a bot for X and Threads, that uses an LLM for every New York Times article to judge whether the headline is misleading and then write a tweet for each misleading New York Times headline. Such a project could hurt the reputation of the New York Times among their audience, which is something they actually care about.
What makes you think that journalists have more latitude to influence headlines in a way where they could take responsibility for the headline if they work at an outlet where journalists generally don’t write headlines but headlines are written by people who are better trained at writing headlines that get clicked a lot?
I exert influence where I can. I think if all of LessWrong took up this norm we could shift the headline-content accuracy gap.
I don’t think that’s the case, because the journalist you are speaking to is not the person who’s makes the decision.
At the moment you have some person who’s trained to write headlines so that the headlines get a maximum of clicks and who writes headlines for a lot of articles.
If the management of the New York Times has to decide whether they are willing to get 20% less clicks on social media when they let a journalists instead of their current headline writers write the headlines, just so that people on LessWrong are more willing to give the New York Times interviews, I don’t think that will change their management decisions.
Shaming the New York Times for misinformation might work better. You could write a bot for X and Threads, that uses an LLM for every New York Times article to judge whether the headline is misleading and then write a tweet for each misleading New York Times headline. Such a project could hurt the reputation of the New York Times among their audience, which is something they actually care about.
I think this is incorrect. I imagine journalists have more latitude to influence headlines when they arelly care.
It’s a bit dated but https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/40251/196 gives you some overview over the state of affairs from 2017.
What makes you think that journalists have more latitude to influence headlines in a way where they could take responsibility for the headline if they work at an outlet where journalists generally don’t write headlines but headlines are written by people who are better trained at writing headlines that get clicked a lot?