Editors have always been task masters. Each exhibits a mixture of ruthless honesty and a genuine, almost childlike curiosity. Both of these—for the journalist answering to his boss—can be particularly exhausting, doubly so given the additional relentlessness of deadlines.
Today’s front page is tomorrow’s trash can liner. You are only as good as your last headline. Forget what you did yesterday. What have you got for me today?
When you’re pursuing a story, sometimes the curious and periodically mercurial child tells you that it’s too “thin.” Not enough detail. Not enough reporting. More sources. More examples. More corroboration.
All this used to come down on your head as the deadline neared. Intensity, desperation, flop sweat and shouting increase in every publishing operation when you’re “on deadline.” Like I said, relentless.
However, “on deadline” used to happen every day at 4 if you worked on a daily, on Friday if your weekly came out on Monday, 3 months in advance of mail if you worked on a monthly.
Now it happens all day everyday for everyone. This morning’s news is ancient by noon. Forget what you did at 8 am. What have you got at 10?
The deadline is when it happens not when the presses need to run.
What about the editor? Ruthless, honest, curious, mercurial, childish—and now an algorithm.
The publishing ecosystem always was a bit of a shark tank but now your ability to out-swim the newly voracious shark is based on metrics like CTRs. The current state of media, according to the New York Times, is “frantic and fatigued.”
The young person’s game that took journalists from churning out wire service copy to feature reporting is now driven by Google algorithms that garner readers’ attention. If you’re not in that “most viewed” box on the publication’s homepage, you’re probably toast at today’s editorial meeting. At Gawker Media, the “big board,” a flat-screen TV on the newsroom wall, displays the 10 most-viewed articles on all the company’s websites with the author’s last name and the number of page views per hour. Talk about relentless. It turns journalism into a competitive sport and reporters into sprinters who burn out before they’re 30.
Forget quality, nuance, credentials, wordsmanship. It’s a popularity contest pure and simple.
There is, of course, another side to this story. Some publishers swear that Google is good for journalism because if there’s nothing decent to search for, there’ll be no reason to go to Google.
Online publishers reckon that their competitive advantage comes down to 2 things: speed and traffic. The downside for the journalist is sweat shop conditions. The downside for the reader is lowest common denominator content that is seldom worth more than a skim. Metrics for online versions of print publications show that people still read magazines but only skim the same content online. The media is successfully turning us into shallow consumers. By playing to our human weakness for whatever’s easiest, they’re dumbing down the copy—and therefore, dumbing down the citizenry.
Journalism is no longer the medium where, in the immortal words of William Strunk, “every word [must] tell.” The keyword rules. And, in that process, we could all lose.
You have unearthed publishing’s Eureka moment, but trust me, few will pay attention except you, me and 10 percent of engaged citizenry. No media has the power to turn us into shallow consumers unless we let it.
I read Treasure Island at the age of 8. I am a literary creature and though I love my computer and the Internet, it is strictly for my purposes. As far as the lure shop Google, this fish has the ability to ignore a lure, take a nibble, or swallow hook line and sinker (gladly).
Nothing beats quality. A well written story should not start with the writer thinking up keywords and clever ways of working them in. He/she should just do the research, find points of interest, points of conflict, get quotes (if appropriate, from well informed sources) and write the damn thing up.
Strunk’s quote was a battle cry. New Media hipsters would do well to heed it or they will end up feeding our growing culture of Oprahsized infantilism. Knowledge is earned, and there is no imagination without knowledge.
There is Strunk and then there is Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” My feeling is that content is increasingly a commodity–sad but too often true. High quality content will always win readers, followers, fans, friends–call them what you will. But a lot of what is out there, what has always been out there in fact, is mediocre.
But if content is a commodity, creativity is not. Creative people will find ways to reinvent the media and produce the good stories people will still want to read.