In Reality

"Whoever comes back from this weekend with the best headline gets to keep their job. It's as simple as that. It has to be web savvy... salacious if you can get it. I don't care but it needs to get hits. The winner is whomever has most hits by the end of Monday."

Valerie's feet went a little cold. The words had come from Philip Selwyn, her editor-in-chief, and he knew exactly how she felt about internet headlines. Clickbait. She had complained about it since they had first crept into the business, but they had especially galled her lately in their puerile insult to a reader's intellect. It wasn't about content, it was about promising the reader that by clicking the link, you'd actually get some interesting news as promised. You'll never guess... number seven will blow you away. No. It never blew anyone away. But that didn't matter because they had made their money from your click. It was about reaching the widest possible audience: the lowest common denominator of news consumers. Journalism wasn't about what was important any more; it was about reporting whatever crap could generate the most click revenue. But real news didn't need to hide behind superlatives. Real and good news sold itself on its content, and its headline would at least honestly reflect that. Clickbait was a scam. Worst of all, it was eroding the quality work that journalists could do to survive.

The three other staff writers walked out of the room silently. Valerie stayed behind. Phil looked at her and shrugged. "It is what it is, Valerie. Times change."

She said nothing but decided it was her time to file silently out as well. She knew better than to fight it. The only thing she could do to save her job was to find the best headline that the deadline could yield. She wasn't about to grab for some socialite celebrity story. Certainly one of the others would, but it wouldn't be her. She had to outdo the idiocy with something real and something with teeth. Beyond crafting mere clickbait, she would have a genuinely dramatic news story. Something meaningful that could even trend across social media. Valerie knew that like it or not, if she didn't adapt to this changing medium that she might as well go find another career.

She went back to her desk and fell into her chair, where she began scrolling listlessly through her email. Maybe she could find something worthy of the advertising dollars the newspaper was chasing. She scrolled back to something that had come in an hour earlier, with the subject line "This story will change your life." It looked as though the sender was versed in writing clickbait titles of their own.

So she clicked it.

Dear Valerie Madison,

You are not to blame for that chipmunk that was dead on the sidewalk. It was that older boy that passed you on his bike. You didn't know he would do that.

I know many other things, but you can trust me. I will call you soon. 

It took a moment to register with her, but when she remembered it, she immediately read the email again. There had been a bandit of a chipmunk on a bike path when she was a child. She was riding by when it burst suddenly onto the path's shoulder in a demand for food. It startled her, and she jammed the brake suddenly, nearly smashing herself into the neck of the handlebars.

It was the cutest thing she had ever seen. The chipmunk twitched its nose at her, raising his tiny hands as if to summon for anything she might have. She rifled through her pockets for a piece of candy but found nothing, and she saw that the rodent's bravado was shrinking into skittishness. She decided to race home to find something. As she went, she passed an older boy on a bike who lived down the road from her. She thought nothing of it until she returned later with some crackers, to find the chipmunk dead at the side of the path. She knelt down beside it and tried to feed it a piece of cracker, hoping some food might bring it back to life. But its tail was stiff, with its tiny claws frozen apart as if to screech 'murder!' She wept for several minutes, heartbroken for the animal and unsure of how she could live in a world where someone could ever do such a thing. It had to have been that boy that passed her.