Anyone who spends longer than an hour or two browsing the web, or scrolling through their feed on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, likely comes across dozens of links to so-called “viral” content sites like ViralNova, BuzzFeed or Upworthy. Do newspapers really need to start creating their own similar websites in order to try and cash in on this wave of clickbait? The British daily The Independent seems to think that they do, so it recently launched a site called i100, complete with short news bits, celebrity gossip and large “upvote” buttons.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review and other profiles of the site, the idea behind it was to take some of the content from the Independent (owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev) and make it more digestible, and also to give some of the content from the paper’s sister publication — a product with shorter…