Abstract:

Clickbait news, which is quite common within the online news media, uses headlines designed to keep the reader curious about the rest of the story. Thanks to such headlines that include attention-grabbing, provocative, sensational expressions and evoke positive and negative emotions, readers are encouraged to click on more news. This study aims to examine the emotional dimension of clickbait news using environmental news. For this aim 519 news covering mucilage (sea snot) on hurriyet.com.tr, ensonhaber.com, milliyet.com.tr, sözcü.com.tr and yeniakit.com.tr, which are the 5 most visited news websites in Turkey, were subjected to content analysis. It was found that that almost all clickbait news has a positive or negative emotional dimension. Since negative news attracts more attention than positive and neutral news, news sites tend to spread more negative news. Clickbait news with a negative emotional tone was mostly found in the scientific research, explanation or warning category. It was observed that news in this category rarely mention solutions and use extremely simple, unscientific and sensational language. At this point, it can be said that the criteria of "negative news" and "shareability" represent important news value for news sites. However, it is possible to state that this situation damages both environmental journalism and science journalism in terms of quality.

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