Edward Wasserman writes in the Miami Herald about the idea of measuring journalism by the number of online views it gets:
Penelope Trunk delivered career advice on Yahoo Finance until two weeks ago, when Yahoo dropped her Brazen Careerist column. Trunk says Yahoo decided the column didn’t draw enough traffic to warrant the premium rates advertisers pay to be in its financial news package. So out she went.
Now, I have sympathy for a career columnist with career problems, but my concern here isn’t with whether she was handled fairly but with what her experience suggests about the direction that online journalism is heading.
That direction seems to be toward handing over tighter and much more precise influence over editorial content to the outside people who write the checks. If she’s right about the reasons for her dismissal, Trunk has become an early casualty of the new order of online news — calibrated journalism.
Under the new rules, the commercial value of specific editorial offerings is estimated with precision, rewards and punishments doled out accordingly, and coverage cut to fit.
His arguments are in the same ballpark as my controversial post last year about the non-wisdom of the crowds:
Even more troubling about the idea that customers should dictate the content of newspapers is that we get awfully close to the troubling concept of collective decision-making, or the “hive mind,†that is already alive on much of the Internet. Better journalism will not come about by a popular vote of the masses; they’ve already spoken along those regards and like Fox News and Entertainment Tonight more than they will ever like international affairs coverage. The collective will “vote†not to seek the truth but to seek a point of equilibrium — in other words, not choosing what is true but the slant on the facts that they can live with, akin to the online collective mind displayed in Wikipedia or digg.
So what does all this abstract theory have to do with daily newspapers? It leads publishers to abandon their mission and hand over control to the collective mob. Don’t get me wrong; I am all for opening up the newsroom to more transparency, including more and different voices, changing our focus from the pseudo-objective he said-she said dichotomy, getting more aggressive and courageous in speaking truth to power. I like bloggers; they add to the richness of the community and provide interesting new ways of framing arguments or discussions. And I’m not saying don’t listen to your audience, since your primary responsibility is to them as citizens of the democracy.
But journalism (the act of finding new information and presenting it in readable and prove-ably believable ways to consumers) is not compatible with a collective, which will seek to impose the tyranny of the lowest-common denominator. Good journalism needs individual perspectives, human decision-makers, a real name attached to it that consumers can hold accountable. Unfortunately, that idea is losing out to aggregators such as Google News (which makes news decisions based on an algorithm) and meta-aggregators such as digg or reddit, where the online collective decides what is news and what is not.
But the Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn disagrees, as Wasserman points out, and implores editors to give the readers what they want. To demonstrate the gap between what those editors think is the most important news and what readers think, Hirschorn looked at daily newspapers’ front pages and the corresponding “Most E-Mailed” stories list on their websites on those same days:
In my own attempt to formulate a reader-response theory, I reviewed a week’s worth of front pages of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times in September and compared them with each day’s most–e-mailed list, which seemed more useful than the most-blogged list, because it factors out agenda-driven blogging.
I had expected the most–e-mailed results to track the lineups of the more baldly audience-focused TV newscasts, which have increasingly made a fetish of “news that matters to you,†and hence are packed with tedious features on your health, your real estate, your job, your children, and so forth. Instead, the most–e-mailed lists, despite a smattering of parochial concerns, were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting. What they were not, generally, was important, at least not in the grand tectonic geopolitical sense.
Hirschorn then goes a step further in his logic, in a conclusion that is a must-read for any journalist who hopes to have a job in this industry in three years:
… [B]ased on my very unscientific analysis, what readers think is interesting and what editors think is important tends to overlap less than one-quarter of the time. This could simply mean that because hard news is ubiquitous or already on the front page, Web users assume their friends already know about it and don’t need an e-mail to bring it to their attention.
But wouldn’t readers forward anything they find interesting? My more sobering conclusion is that readers might no longer need newspapers for news. And by “news†I mean the traditional newspaper functions of reporting on congressional hearings, city-council meetings, sporting events, earnings reports, and so forth. This is now commodity information, available instantly and everywhere, thanks to the wires and more-specialized services. Even “scoops,†traditionally the gas that fuels the journos’ competitive fires, bring only bragging rights, since what’s in the morning’s newspaper has already been digested on the Web, the radio, and the morning TV shows, and has been deposited in your in-box before you can be bothered to pick up an actual newspaper.
Wasserman responds that such thinking is a dead-end for quality journalism:
… [C]hasing what’s interesting has always been a lot easier, and a lot more bankable, than pursuing what’s important. Big-city tabloids have done it for generations. So has local TV news: fast-paced, personality-driven, human-scale — and hollow to the core, a civic blight.
Civic blight is a great term for the end result of the media and political vapidity we see today in our nation. The rise of bloggers and the rebirth of civic activism is a welcome antidote to it, but I fear it might not be enough to overcome the impact of ratings-driven, corporate-profits-focused MSM.
