Cecil, clicks and Kleinberg in the New York Times

Using the explosion of interest in the story of Cecil the lion as a starting point, the New York Times recently explored the question of whether "online news has deteriorated, and that it is now focused on the viral at the expense of the substantive." While the founder of The Verge quipped that "Reading disposable web journalism is 'like eating a whole bag of Doritos'", Jon Kleinberg comments that these kinds of stories have probably always caught on, and what has changed now is just that the internet "makes visible and searchable what was once ephemeral".