Comment by appreciatorBus

They absolutely were. Front page newspaper headlines were the bait to get you to buy, and not all dissimilar to rage bait tweets in their tactics.

The differences in my opinion: - slower timescale - discourse and outage evolved over days and weeks instead of minutes and hours - much more muted feedback mechanism - sales numbers could not tell you which headline or article drove in particular conversion - much more muted comment mechanism - people could and did write letters to the editor, including idiots and assholes, but only a small percentage were ever printed. Those that were printed, were at the very least read by someone at the paper before being approved.