Your feed is loud for a reason
Headlines did not get shriller because journalists got worse. They got shriller because attention became the scarce good, and scarcity has consequences economists can describe precisely.
Open any news app and the texture is familiar: everything is urgent, everything is a crisis, every headline promises a revelation that the article does not contain. The usual explanation is that journalism has declined, or that readers have got stupider.
Neither is a very good explanation. Both are stories about character, and character does not usually change across an entire industry inside twenty years. Incentives do.
Start with what is actually scarce
Newsprint was scarce once. Column inches cost money, so an editor had to choose. Today, publishing is close to free — anyone can put a million words online this afternoon for the price of a domain name.
What did not change is the reader. There are still twenty-four hours in a day and still only so many of them anyone will give to reading. So the scarce good moved. It used to be the space to publish in. Now it is the attention to be published to.
Once you see that, the shouting stops looking like decline and starts looking like competition. Every outlet is bidding for the same fixed resource, and the currency of the bid is the headline.
Why competition makes it worse, not better
The intuition most people carry is that competition improves things. More outlets, more scrutiny, better journalism. For much of the twentieth century that was roughly right.
The modern problem is that readers mostly cannot tell, before clicking, whether an article is any good. They can see the headline. They cannot see the carefulness. So the competition happens on the thing that is visible — and the thing that is visible is not the thing that is valuable.
Economists call this a signalling problem, and it has a predictable shape. When buyers can only observe one cheap signal, sellers invest in that signal rather than in the underlying quality. The headline is the signal. Carefulness is the quality. The two come apart, and the gap between them widens exactly as competition gets fiercer.
There is a further twist. An outlet that would prefer to be careful cannot simply be careful. If everyone else is shouting, the quiet headline is not read at all, and an unread article informs nobody. The honest outlet is pushed towards the loud headline not by greed but by the arithmetic of being heard. That is the uncomfortable result: competition can turn a sincere publisher into a sensational one without anyone changing what they want.
Two things this does not mean
It does not mean readers are irrational. Scanning a headline and deciding in half a second is a sensible response to having four hundred items and no time. Given what a reader can observe, the behaviour is reasonable. The failure is in what is observable, not in the person.
It does not mean more competition is always worse. Competition still disciplines outright lying, and still breaks stories that monopolies would bury. The point is narrower and stranger: along the specific dimension of restraint — the qualification, the paragraph admitting the evidence is mixed — competitive pressure runs the wrong way.
What actually changes it
Anything that lets a reader observe quality before consuming it. Reputation that is slow to build and expensive to lose. Subscriptions, which pay for whether you stay rather than whether you clicked. Formats where the writing is seen before it is chosen.
Notice that all three are about detaching payment from the click. That is the lever. Everything else is complaining about the weather.
I write about this for a living — currently on what happens to news quality when outlets compete over readers who cannot pay attention to everything. If there is interest I will write up the formal version, which is more precise and considerably less fun.