Way back in 1996, the distinguished American journalist James Fallows published Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, a remarkable study of the pernicious effects of broadcast television on democracy.
Among the phenomena he examined were the relentless trivialisation implicit in soundbite politics, the obsessive insistence that every political issue — no matter how complex — has only two sides and the tendency to treat every political controversy as if it were a football game and every election a horse race. But, en passant, Fallows also highlighted an equally disturbing trend — towards market-driven news: that is, news agendas that are driven not by some professional assessment of what’s important and relevant, but by research into what viewers like and respond to. Put crudely, such an approach leads to news programming that plays down politics and economics in favour of coverage of crime, celebrity and sport. News-U-Like, as it were.
Earlier this month, Fallows decided to revisit this territory by embarking on a study of contemporary online news media. His findings are summarised in a sobering article in the Atlantic entitled Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media. He began by visiting Nick Denton, an expatriate Brit who is the founder and CEO of a clutch of websites known collectively as Gawker Media. Fallows was intrigued by Denton as “the Fleet Street rogue [he grew up in London and went to Oxford] willing to tart up and shake up stuffy American newsrooms, with something entirely new: the most refined tools ever created for knowing exactly what an audience wants to see and read, as opposed to someone’s opinion of what it should want or ‘needs’ to know”.
Gawker, in other words, is “a distillation of the model toward which the news business is trending”. Cut to Gawker‘s open-plan office in New York. It is dominated by a huge screen, the top part of which shows live views of the home pages of the main Gawker sites. They bring in 32-million unique visitors a month, about the same as the New York Times. On-screen meters provide a live display of traffic to each site. The lower part of the screen lists specific stories from each site, ranked by how many people are viewing them at each moment. “As you watch,” Fallows reports, “the stories switch places on the screen, each with a green arrow if it’s trending up or a red arrow if it’s heading down.
“When I arrived, Your Horoscope May Have Changed still led the chart for all sites but was heading down, while The Horrible Life of a Disney Employee was in second place and on the way up.” Fallows asked some of the Gawker journalists how they decided what to write. “I just try to figure out,” replied one, “if I were to go to a party, what would everyone want to talk about? That is what I’d want to write.”
At this point, anyone who works in an online newsroom will grimace, because somewhere in their fancy open-plan offices is a guy who is watching the second-by-second audience for every page on the site. He’s the chap who knows what’s “trending” now and if your stories aren’t figuring then — depending on the editorial culture — you may eventually feel the heat of managerial disapproval. And this is all a product of the same technology that drives online advertising by giving advertisers instant feedback on which messages are working.
The pressures facing online journalists are illustrated by a slide from a leaked AOL presentation that the media commentator Frédéric Filloux posted last week. Under the heading Decide What Topics to Cover, the slide lists four factors to be considered. They are: Traffic Potential (“How many page views will this content generate?”); Revenue/Profit (“What CPM [cost per thousand impressions, a measure of online advertising effectiveness] will this content earn?”); Turnaround Time (“How long will it take to produce?”); and finally Editorial Integrity (“Will this content conform to AOL‘s editorial standards?”). In that order.
The relative importance attached to each of these factors will vary with the prevailing editorial culture of different news organisations. But in a fiercely competitive world, the ability of the technology to deliver such compelling measures of effectiveness dramatically changes the atmosphere in which journalism is done.
The success of Gawker shows that one path to profitability lies in a relentless attention to the whims and vagaries of a fickle online audience. Nick Denton is a leader because he follows where his audience goes. And if you were thinking of registering the domain newsulike.com, forget it. It’s already taken. – guardian.co.uk