At the end of 2014, Slate chronicled the year’s seemingly nonstop stream of outrage, during which nearly every day brought a new scandal demanding our opprobrium. Someone said the wrong thing, a celebrity did something awful, a Slate writer argued a contrarian position—even a minor imbroglio, whether it was the war on Columbus Day or manspreading, seemed to conjure up a flurry of angry articles analyzing its significance for our doomed society. If all those think pieces left you feeling fatigued, I bring good news: We have already passed peak outrage. Outrage clickbait is dying. Make no mistake, outrage will still be with us—on news networks, talk radio, and Twitter—but its role in written journalism on the Internet is going to fade. Of course, writers of all stripes will still write passionately about what pisses them off; it’s the massive reduplication, the aggregation of outrage, that’s going to go out of fashion. We’ll still hear about the ghastly uptick in measles cases and the anti-vaccination hype that brought it about, but well-reported stories will no longer be followed by hundreds of “analysis” pieces summing up the original article and adding only a soupcon of context, attitude, derision, or moral injunction. The volume will decrease. There will be less ranting about why Thor shouldn’t be a woman, why Patton Oswalt is a horrible human being, why Sheryl Sandberg isn’t a feminist, and why you should never upload naked photos of yourself to the Web. The tweetstorms will not abate—but they will cease to be overamplified by opportunists with blogging quotas. We’ll say goodbye to this model because it will no longer be good business. The culprit? The declining effectiveness of traditional Internet advertising, for starters, and the increasingly cozy relationship, spatial and otherwise, between digital advertising and digital journalism, which will slowly but inevitably leave less room for viral outrage. The old model relies on short-form analysis, low overhead, and high volume to draw readers, who hopefully then click on accompanying banner ads and share the story on social networks. Much of this ecosystem has thrived on indignation. To understand why it’s about to crumble, it’s worth recapping how outrage became profitable, and it started with right-wing media.
So a kind of Balkanization of our society is going to end all the big outrage. Lol, that's good news? : )
I don't see it that way. News on cable is 24 hours and they need something to talk about. Nobody would watch if the news was, "Everything is OK."