In journalism, a hot take is a "piece of deliberately provocative commentary that is based almost entirely on shallow moralizing" in response to a news story,[1] "usually written on tight deadlines with little research or reporting, and even less thought".
[4] The term gained popularity in sports journalism in 2012 to describe the coverage of National Football League quarterback Tim Tebow and was analyzed in a Pacific Standard article by Tomás Ríos.
[1] It became increasingly used in other forms of journalism in 2014 after a piece on The Awl by John Herrman to describe the economic pressure on online publishers to produce instant, often glib, responses to current events.
[5] In April 2015, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith wrote on Twitter: "We are trying not to do hot takes", to explain the deletion of two articles that were critical of the site's advertisers.
[6] Hot takes are often associated with social media, where they can be easily shared and commented on by both readers and other journalists, a lucrative environment for publishers that encourages recursive "meta-takes", which John West described as "a black hole from which no attention can escape".