the godsend of the algorithm

Fellow hacks,

Here's a good yarn.
The death of journalism part XXVII.
How a reporter ended up making click-bait for a meagre living:

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/confessions-of-a-clickbait-creator-amazing-lol-1.2876398

Luckily it didn't happen to me, but once I tried my hand at the digital side of Sky News trying to keep up with these modern trends [LOL!], I quickly came to realise that I had outlived my usefulness.
No regrets.
Mind you, this is from a blowie who started out in a state-of-the-art radio newsroom where our most important tool was the fixed-line telephone; we also had reporter's two-way radio's, quarter-inch tape recorders, cartridge tape players, Olivetti typewriters & carbon paper, a single telex machine, and a brand new-fangled thing called a facsimilie machine.
Woot!
Viral cat videos aside, it's only now the defeated Democrats in the US of A are complaining about "fake news" and how the Russians got in on the scam.
Oh, c'mon, for gawd's sake, it's been around since the year dot; it's called propaganda, it's only that the people making it now have much cleverer and more powerful tools at their disposal than the Gutenberg press.
Goebbels would have loved the godsend of the algorithm.

(originally published 2-12-16)