As the World Wide Web becomes more engrained in our daily content consumption, one of the things that’s become apparent to me in the past few years is cosmic shift from focusing on quality to quantity of content, and how success is measured.
It used to be: Get a scoop, write a great article, get it in the paper before deadline, sell it on news stands, and make money doing it. The public is informed and is happy to pay for it, the advertisers are happy to reach that audience, and everyone wins.
While this formula still works sometimes, it’s heavily padded with click-bait and rage-inducing nonsense. Columnists type up drunken rants as if their goal is to cite examples of every logical fallacy. That’s not the point though – the article is considered a ‘success’ if it gets a bazillion page views. Never mind that the comments are a hate-fest of insults directed at the author for writing such nonsense – as comments usually are – the end game is to get people to click on this train-wreck. It’s painfully clear when a publication props up – or its business model relies on – illogical writing with even slimier headlines to draw in clicks and outrage folks. This isn’t journalism. The writers are hacks and the editors are even worse for allowing it, and it’s become prevalent in otherwise reputable publications.
The online news media needs to stop congratulating itself every time it reaches a new page-view metric. First, this is bound to keep happening as the world itself goes more digital. Second, they themselves know that their dung-flinging columnists/bloggers/reporters and bag-of-SEO-tricks for ever-changing search algorithms artificially increases their click totals. Meanwhile, way too many of their ‘readers’ don’t even know which site they’re on as the scan through, at most, the first paragraph and click away. The publication then celebrates these metric ‘milestones’ with champagne called ‘Bad Journalism.’ No one can argue that most articles written today, particularly for the web, are better written and researched than in years past. Back then, there was less space, more money, and greater competition to print something actually meaningful. Plus, their readers knew what publication they were actually reading.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t anything good out there now. The time, energy, and resources spent on many projects these days can still hold water alongside the best journalism of years past. The breaking news articles, the scoops, the in-depth objective look and data gathering that reveals startling finds – that still happens. I can’t be prouder to know some of the folks who get this stuff, or to work for an organization that invests so heavily in it.
But those page-view monkeys… the ones whose serotonin levels run parallel to the metrics… This is nothing short of a new drug among journalists and editors. I believe, though, that this formula simply won’t be sustainable in the long run. The revenue won’t reward it.
I’ve been a blogger for a while now. The worst of my content is a cute or silly post about something that wouldn’t have been written had something better come along. But that doesn’t make me a hack. I’d argue, strongly, that there are more hacks today considered ‘journalists’ – and ‘editors’ – than ever before. And they’ve never celebrated themselves so much, either.