KLÕPSAMA PEIBUTAVAD LÜNKPEALKIRJAD VEEBIMEEDIAS
FORWARD-REFERENCE HEADLINES AS CLICKBAIT IN ESTONIAN ONLINE MEDIA

Summary/Abstract: The era of online click media has begun. Journalists are creating clickbait headlines, which aim at catching readers’ attention and making them want to click on the headline. This kind of headlines can be misleading and not live up to the readers’ expectations. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview on the kind of clickbait headlines that cannot completely be interpreted without context: forward referencing headlines. Headlines from the entertainment portal Elu24’s from 2008, 2013 and 2018 were analyzed. The results indicate that the headlines of 2013 contained the most forward-reference, although 2018 was not far behind. Mostly, nouns and quantifiers as well as interrogative and imperative sentences were used for creating forward-reference. Pronouns and proadverbs and exclamatory sentences were used less. In some cases, the reference was created by multiple linguistic tools at once. An interview with a long-time Elu24 journalist helped explain the results.

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