The story has been updated with Moneycontrol’s response, which the author had not sought earlier. We regret the oversight. The author, however, stands by the story.

An online journalist’s day in India starts by logging into Google trends or Crowdtangle, identifying the trending news at a given hour, followed by churning out as many copies around a given trend hoping they will start bringing traffic to her website.

For the past two weeks, most online journalists have been tied up filing CBSE, ICSE and state board results. Class X and Class XII results are assumed as turning points in most Indian students’ lives. And just like Facebook targets teenagers with low self-esteem at the lowest point of their emotional state to drive engagement and revenue around ads, publishers in India are manipulating the anxiety of students surrounding their public exam results to drive clicks and ad revenue.

Take any news website — The Times of India, The Economic Times, News 18, NDTV, Hindustan Times, Firstpost — and search for ‘results’. In most cases, these websites have tens of articles with the same content and picture but with different headlines optimised for different keywords populating the website.

The trend isn’t just restricted to general interest news websites.

Take the case of Moneycontrol.com, a website that calls itself the leading source of financial information. The website has 25 people on the desk covering financial news on good days. For the past two weeks, the website has allocated most of its resources to covering results, according to a current employee of the website. The employee adds that the website is posting articles that neither confirm nor deny the results being declared with headlines such as “results may or may not come” just to attract traffic.

The economics of publishing is governed by volume of content published, which creates space for ads. More content implies more space for ads. Online that translates to more clicks and more pageviews, which generate higher ad revenue.

In the case of Moneycontrol.com, the employee says the financial news website doubled its traffic to 10.5 million pageviews in the last two weeks with stories optimised around results. In the month of March, the website had 5 million pageviews.

Moneycontrol reached out to Newslaundry and stated that these “page view numbers reported in the story are wrong”. It has also added that the assertion that the website allocated most of its resources to covering results is blatantly incorrect.

“Throughout our coverage, we were punctilious in putting the interests of these readers first, and gave them the latest information we had. In all our articles we relied on official confirmations, information from websites that are partners of various boards and credible media reports that cited a source. It’s malicious to suggest that the website is gaming readers with its headlines.”

But as in the case of public exam results, what is good for news organisations — more content and more pageviews — isn’t necessarily good for the public that is consuming this avalanche of information. The information deluge on the Internet makes it impossible for students to figure out what is happening: are the results going be announced today, tomorrow, or soon? There is very little original reporting. Much of what is produced online is a rehash of existing news reports or speculative information from untrustworthy websites. Few headlines are pasted below for references.

We saw a similar situation recently when news of linking Aadhaar to bank accounts started emerging. It is not mandatory to link bank accounts to Aadhaar numbers. But the information ecosystem that emerged following the news left little space for clarity on the issue, with news organisation making videos and dummy’s guide to link bank accounts to Aadhaar. Ask any lay person, is it necessary or even mandatory to link bank accounts to Aadhaar numbers, the answer in most cases would be a yes, followed by lack of clarity on why.

The net effect of such publishing strategies and the rush for clicks is that instead of informing the public, news organisations end up misinforming them. Instead of helping them make informed choices, news organisations leave citizens confused. This, in turn, creates space for alternative and fake news organisations to take the place of established news brands. If there is a crisis of trust in the media, it is, in many ways, the making of established news organisations and their revenue maximising publishing strategies.

This is a symptom of what Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger, Medium and the co-founder of Twitter, calls a broken Internet. In moving from traditional media to digital, we simply transported the ad-supported economic model of legacy media online, without ever pausing to think whether it will work on the Internet, which is governed by atomization and scale. The stakeholders — news organisations and platforms such as Google and Facebook — have no incentives for fixing the broken Internet because their existence and much of their revenue is ad-dependent.

Where does this leave the news consumer and news organisations?

In many ways, this is the golden age of content. A content consumer today has more choices than ever in human history. Many news organisations such as Scroll, The Wire, The Indian Express and Hindustan Times are producing good journalism. But an average news consumer today has no way of believing what is true and what is false online. A recent BBC study on the fake news ecosystem in India suggests that 72 per cent Indians can no longer distinguish between fake and authentic information online. Trust in established news organisations is waning, despite their good work. And consumers are looking at alternative news organisations for information.

The Internet has changed the way we consume information and media. News organisations and journalists are no longer the default gatekeepers of information that comes out in the public.

A link on to a blog looks no different from a link to an established news website and there is no way of identifying on the Internet which of the two is authentic. The more news organisations chase clicks and traffic, the more information that is crucial to keep citizens informed and help grow a democracy becomes scarce, the more their authority wanes.

Cultural changes are usually the result of economic changes. Unlike in the West, where dwindling profits have forced news organisations to rethink the role of a journalist and a news organisation, there is no such imperative in India, where media organisations continue to enjoy deep pockets and big investments. It is not that news organisations in India do not see the threat of Internet. They do. Except, they continue to think of protecting the old ways of organising the industry and business models, whether it is with subscriptions models or free content. Good journalism is the lifeline of a functioning democracy. It informs the citizens and holds power to account. News organisations in India, in their rush for clicks, are doing a disservice to democracy. For all of us, this is a crucial moment to rethink journalism and restructure the news industry. We have enough examples here in India such as altnews, smhoaxslayer, Indiaspend, Video Volunteers, Khabar Lahariya and so on. We need more such experiments in the news industry and to begin thinking of ways to save journalism instead of saving news organisations.

Update 1: A screenshot of Moneycontrol’s analytics dashboard was pulled down at the request of the person from the website we spoke to for this story.