I Regret My Career as a Clickbait Writer

My mom used to brush my hair while Sex and the City played in the background. Even though I was a semi-literate five-year-old who would rather eat worms than kiss a boy, I understood enough of the show to know two things: I wanted a wardrobe like Carrie’s, and I wanted to be a writer, clacking away on my laptop for hours each night. 

So I worked to turn my goal into a reality. I wrote stories with glitter gel pens in fuzzy diaries in elementary school. I took newspaper classes in middle school and then high school. At college, I worked at a news station. Once I graduated in 2017, I started freelancing for the entertainment sites I’d dreamed about working with. I did it. I’d done it.

My secrets for success included having a unique writing style and parents who paid my way. I could afford to take low-paying (and no-paying) internships at the big, glossy companies, who were more than happy to pay me pennies to trail their writers around.  

For the most part, I wrote puff pieces about trending topics on social media and fashion round-ups. Every once in a while, an editor would ask for a personal essay about a random event in my life. I’d write them with the intention of making the reader laugh. I figured there was plenty of terrible news out there; people came to these entertainment sites for just that—entertainment.

But something changed around the 2016 presidential election. The rise of pay-per-click content meant the more eyes on your piece, the more money it made. It turned out that laughter, while enjoyable, only sometimes yielded the most profits. Polarizing content, however? That could pay at least the electricity bill. 

A new system emerged: Take any Trump quote and explain why it’s bad. Entire business models were based on this strategy. The articles practically wrote themselves.

Was I now writing for attention first? Had profit outranked entertainment?

With the rise in Trump content also came the rise of racial awareness in American society. That’s when editors started asking me to lean more into my Blackness: Can we have something about what it was like for you to grow up Black in a red state? How close do you live to this officer-involved shooting? Have you, like, ever been the victim of a really bad hate crime? 

These assignments were a far cry from my usual topics, but I wanted more industry exposure. I knew what people would click on. I had no control over what headline the editor would choose for the articles they commissioned, but I maintained relative control of the piece’s narrative. Except it doesn’t matter if people read the whole article—it’s the clicks that count.

For the first time, I received hateful comments full of racial slurs and threats of violence. I’d respond by saying I never intended to make anyone angry. 

The messages started coming even when I hadn’t published an article recently. That meant the piece had gone viral multiple times and continued to reach new areas of the internet. I’d never had any training on what to do if I was being harassed. The messages got meaner. I stopped replying. I took my email out of my Twitter bio. 

Meanwhile, Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein piece for The New Yorker dropped, kicking off the #MeToo movement. Suddenly, any piece exposing (or accusing) a famous man of sexual misconduct would bring in a tidal wave of clicks. 

One of the lifestyle companies I interned-then-freelanced for stumbled into a #MeToo piece of its own. An anonymous tip had come through about an incident between a famous comedian and a young woman. The site hardly ever ran serious, newsy pieces, but this story seemed like it could earn a fair amount of views. And honestly, what was the worst that could happen? 

The story exploded on the internet. 

The girl who anonymously came forward with the story got doxxed. The lead writer of the piece also got doxxed. The accused man disappeared from the public eye. Legitimate news organizations criticized the company for dangerous, irresponsible, and just-plain-bad reporting. Men called it a smear campaign against all men. Women said it delegitimized the stories of “actual victims.” The company that published the story went into panic mode, sending unprepared staffers into interviews and navigating how to move forward from a very public fallout.

I had nothing to do with the writing, editing, or legal approval of that story. But somehow, I still felt implicated in the fallout, felt guilty for participating in the system that’d created the story in the first place. I felt bad for the girl who came forward with a traumatizing event only to be mocked by the general public, I felt bad for the comedian who (to me) genuinely seemed unaware of how his actions came across, and I felt bad for the writer who became a punching bag for the far-right. Who benefited from this story? Not the company that published it, because that company no longer exists. A once-powerful #MeToo movement was now up for debate because of what people considered irresponsible reporting. So what was it all for? 

When I started my professional writing career, I wrote to make people laugh. I wrote for media outlets whose goal was to keep people entertained. But somewhere along the way, everyone’s intentions became distorted. Was I now writing for attention first? Had profit outranked entertainment?

I took a step back from writing for media and entertainment. I still work as a writer, and I don’t regret the majority of the content I churned out in the clickbait trenches. I do, however, regret how easy it was to lose sight of my initial goals as a writer. And I still think a lot about how my own words may have negatively impacted society.