That thing by that guy who doesn't like running stickers

The Oatmeal's 0.0 Blerch sticker

Last week "He Who Should Not Be Named" published an opinion piece in the newspaper with the highest circulation in the country. Keep in mind that this media dinosaur is viewed daily by 400,000 fewer eyeballs (or 200,000 people without eyepatches) than reside in the entire state of Nevada. HWSNBN framed his contempt toward car decals, running stores and actual runners with the all-too-common meme that society is decaying into a morass of self-entitled narcissists. Many of the gripes are not so different from the (probably satirical) 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook from Wait But Why. Certainly there are too may pictures tweeted detailing Thursday's lunch, but humans have always sought to connect with others who have common interests. Runners' cars are no different from those vehicles with a '3', 'Click and Clack for President' or 'I ♥  My Dachshund' decals on the bumper.

Not too surprisingly, the running world and blogosphere exploded with well-though-out and clever rebuttals including from the likes of Runners World. My personal favorite is Matthew Inman's 0.0 Blerch. I have reserved a spot on my bumper for when the Oatmeal inevitably offers this sticker for sale. The running world doesn't need another blog offering a witty dismantling of HWSNBN's drivel. What might be worth considering, however, is the amount of attention we direct toward these kinds of stories. As Mark Remy from Runner's World points out, 15.5 million people finished races in the United States last year. That's over 6 times the daily circulation of HWSNBN's website/newspaper. That's thousands, if not millions, of click-throughs from people who otherwise wouldn't bother reading an opinion piece from HWSNBN.

Increasingly social media is driving web traffic using enticing (and often misleading) headlines, provocative images and inflammatory opinion pieces. I don't think HWSNBN's piece was designed to corner the market on enraged runners (at least not in the same way that the Huffington Post uses youtube dog videos to specifically target me and make sure I visit their site every day), but the outcome is the same. Click-through data doesn't track content quality, just web traffic. I intentionally did not provide a link to the original piece. I did not, and will not mention the author or newspaper by name. Neither deserve the traffic, advertisement or publicity they received from this story. I liken this to my policy about a group that likes to picket funerals as a means to get news organizations to publicly disseminate their nonsense. If we stop paying attention, a lot of the attention seekers will disappear.

Read the hard news and stay informed, but beyond that I propose a simple policy when it comes to internet media. This policy could be applied to running or broadly. Unless it's informative or makes you happy, don't click on the link.