I’m an expert in the use of “I’m an expert” headlines in news media. Here’s why you’re seeing so many of them right now.
First off, before I get around to working out my answer to that bit, here’s a sample of headline expertise declarations from the last few days.
The Sun: “I’m a gardening expert and there’s one houseplant that’s basically impossible to kill.” (I’m sure I’d still manage it.)
Extra.ie: “I’m an insurance expert, here’s how to bring down your premium.” (This one feels reusable.)
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The Mirror: “I’m a walking expert and you don’t need to be doing 10,000 steps a day.” (Phew, but also a walking expert? Ah, I suppose “assistant professor in exercise science” is a touch unwieldy for a headline.)
The Times: “I’m a spa expert. Here are nine things you need to know before a visit.” (I’m an outdoor swimming pool expert if anyone wants to commission me to share my thoughts.)
Only the last one goes under the byline of the expert. The others aren’t first-person pieces at all, but articles where a journalist quotes a person with a grown-up day job or something to promote, as per standard practice.
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the new-school way of highlighting this in the headline opens the door to a potentially infinite spate of “I’m an expert” announcements coming soon to online real estate near you. Eventually, the trend will be undone by its ubiquity, and everybody will have had enough of experts, Michael Gove-style.
But in the interim, “I’m an expert” stands a fair chance of infiltrating every title chasing the same clicks using the same headline-testing tools in search of the same passing audience.
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True, not every headline fashion has sticking power. About six years ago, anodyne entertainment news snippets were liable to be inflated into the format “Celebrity A makes HUGE claim about Celebrity B”, and then, just as suddenly, most of these huge claims were wiped out overnight, the survivors living on mainly in the football gossip genre.
Not too many people will remember much about Upworthy, the US media brand that helped popularise headlines with two phrases, one of which was invariably “you won’t believe what happened next”.
What happened next was that Upworthy’s virality dwindled after one of those casually unfavourable Facebook algorithm changes that used to spark waves of panic across the social app-hooked media. The headline customs it gifted the rest of the news industry swiftly became passé.
Meanwhile, in the complete opposite of the “I’m an expert” vogue, HuffPost UK has been going through a phase of reinventing news as “news to me”.
This takes the form of headlines that begin “I Just Found Out” or “I Just Realised”, while the story text — which tends to involve the words “I’m shook” at some point — is typically about filling in gaps about the 20th century for younger readers who may have missed it.
The “I Just Found Out ...” content variety hasn’t spread too far beyond HuffPost — unless it actually has but I just haven’t realised it yet.
Another headline style that sadly hasn’t caught on is the one the New York Times favours for interviews, which aims for grand-sounding, semi-enigmatic statements expressed in the kind of simple language that seems profound by default.
“Al Pacino is Still Going Big,” is one from the weekend, preceded by “Saoirse Ronan has Lived, and Acted, Through a Lot”. Haven’t we all?
But perhaps the most perfect — and accurate — example comes from this widely read 2021 interview: “Sinéad O’Connor Remembers Things Differently”.
I love this heart-of-the-matter approach, if only because the quotes used by every other outlet in interview headlines can terrify subjects into dull, taciturn mode. They have the rational fear that their one snappy, offhand line will be blown up into a bizarrely random headline that makes them look weird and ridiculous, so they clam up.
I can only assume the New York Times trick hasn’t been copied because it doesn’t attract as much web traffic as the single spicy (and neatly edited) quote.
For the same reason — the tyranny of online metrics — the media now makes a big, upfront song-and-dance about the expertise of the people they quote.
It’s a crowded, chaotic information environment out there. We’re all just trying to find needles of genuine authority in the haystacks of charlatanism. We want nuggets of credible assurance to propel us through the desolate landscape of wrongness, fakery, paranoia and poor advice.
Awkwardly, cost pressures on news outlets mean full-time journalists are more likely than ever to be employed as ultra-flexible generalists. They’re less likely than before to be able to maintain the sort of specialisms that would reasonably see them classed as experts. Indeed, when journalists are introduced as “experts”, what that usually means is they’re being paid less than people identified as correspondents or editors in their particular field.
But that “expert” is a subjective label, not an official job title, makes it delightfully easy to deploy at will. It can be hard to rate the provenance of any given fact or assertion while we’re mid-scroll. The “I’m an expert” line appears like a trap door to suck us all in. It leaves nothing to chance.
We think if we click on the magic link, we will find true knowledge and wisdom lying within. We can finally put the internet down.
And if we can’t, no need to worry. A smartphone addiction expert will be along in a minute to tell us how.
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