Pardon my schadenfreude over
this inside-media story:
Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and
fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the
globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their
computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be
first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything
that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their
way.
Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or
shaming — writers based on those results has become
increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The
Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to
its staff that lists the number of page views for each article
on the paper’s Web site that day.
The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles
Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages.
Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media,
now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on
their articles. …
“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when
you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,”
said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, in an interview
from the publication’s offices just across the Potomac River
from downtown Washington. “Now at any point in the day starting
at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity
and pressure to get something out.”
Well, this is certainly not a wholly beneficent trend —
such online metrics tend to favor The Big Scoop over feature
writing and other necessary elements of a balanced news diet —
but it’s certainly good to see journalists being confronted with
the supply-and-demand reality that the news business is, after
all, a business.
Having spent the first decade of my career at small newspapers
where the challenge was always to produce enough copy to fill the
pages, I learned by hard experience “the need for speed” in
the news business. Merely surviving at a small paper
requires the ability to crank out stories in a ferocious
hurry.
When I came to Washington in 1997, I discovered that many
D.C. journalists have never had the valuable lessons that
such early experience imparts. Large staffs and
specialized “beats” meant that, if the State Department didn’t
produce any shocking developments on Tuesday, the reporter whose
job it was to cover the State Department wasn’t expected to file
a story for Wednesday’s paper.
Coming from a background where reporters were expected, at a
minimum, to produce eight bylined stories per week, it was
dismaying to see how many Washington reporters got full-time
salaries for producing at far less than half that pace. They were
lumbering dinosaurs ripe to be supplanted by fast and hungry
mammals.
The rise of online news is slowly driving such dinosaur
journalism out of business, thank God. While the
pay-per-click mentality has some clear disadvantages (fewer
book reviews, less in-depth reporting, more sensational
quick-draw attitudinizing), at least journalists are now forced
to recognize that they must write with the aim of
attracting readers — and do so with a sense of
productivity — or else find some other line of
work.
