The business case behind gaming readers for clicks is showing some serious cracks.
On Monday, two prominent writers expressed frustration at the ongoing push for blog page views. Reuters’ Felix Salmon explored the tension between quality and quantity online, while TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about the “systemic” problem of subpar content. Both pieces argue from the same starting position: There’s a lot of online content that is of low quality produced at high frequency.
In retrospect, this was a predictable terminus of a long path, one that has made clear the difference between news and journalism. News is a thing that happens. Journalism is the process of uncovering and analyzing news.
Blogs have been targeting news. That’s starting to change.
One hundred years ago, the fastest way to share pieces of news was the newspaper. The medium is relatively bad at it. Column inches require added information, analysis and assessment. The fact that the newspaper came out daily invented a craft and made the process of journalism feasible. Fifty years ago, the medium was television: punchier, quicker turnaround. Then, in the last decade, the Web. Blogs. Turnaround time measured in seconds. News fleshed out on an almost nonexistent time frame.
Now: Twitter. News breaks before people recognize that it’s newsworthy. Context or additional news comes in subsequent tweets. Eventually, journalists write blogs or newspaper articles about news that has already broken.
The story of the media’s evolution has been of reduction: reduced size, reduced speed, reduced context. The problem Salmon and Siegler identify may be, in part, this: Blog posts are too long for the news. Journalists treat news like a gas, filling the container they’re given. And a blog is often too big a container for the news.
When Gawker’s Nick Denton in 2008 said that any good idea can be expressed in 200 words, it was not a popular opinion. The proclamation was derided as a symbol of the fatuousness of online news, but this was before Twitter. Short blurbs became the norm — and helped drive Gawker to enormous success. By the end of 2008, the site’s ad revenue had gone up 39 percent.
Media companies are businesses. They need a container that displays ads, which Twitter doesn’t. People justifiably bristle at being directed to a website to get a snippet of news that they could have seen in their Twitter feed. So savvy media enterprises are trying to figure out how to rebalance content sharing, how to create value in visiting a website. The backlash against blogging expressed by Salmon and Siegler on Monday was, largely, against blogs that don’t make that effort, blogs that simply lure people into viewing content on a website that isn’t worth the click.
There’s demonstrable value in moving the other direction. Last month, 7.23 million unique visitors went to Salon.com, making it the 631st most-visited property in America. In an open letter, editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman credited the site’s decision to reduce the number of posts, focusing instead on length and quality. Journalism, in other words. Deep dives on interesting subjects.
Gawker’s Denton now agrees. In a memo at the beginning of January, he outlined Gawker’s path forward: “We can afford for some writers to take time off from the news grind to work on a story or opinion piece that will transform the debate or win the Internet. It’s more satisfying both to writers and readers that way. Relentless and cynical traffic-trawling is bad for the soul.”
By the end of the month, Gawker reported its own record: 35.6 million unique visitors. This wasn’t primarily due to long-form reporting, to be sure, but it demonstrates that long-form innovation is sought even by successful outlets.
The problem with blogs isn’t only that what they present can be content-light — it’s that people often need less context than we think. People are comfortable with quick bites of news at the expense of journalism: quick to load, quick to read. People understand how to curate and seek out more information. News doesn’t always need or have time for long explanations. Forcing context to spur page views is bad customer service.
The universe of blogs may be beginning to separate into two types: those that churn news with ad-justifying content versus ones that use Twitter and short blog posts to provide news, while building an audience that consumes (and shares) long-form journalism.
Over time, the smart bet is on the latter. The former is in direct competition with Twitter.
Philip Bump is a writer covering the intersection of technology and the media for Mediaite and TheAtlantic.com. He lives in New York City.
On Monday, two prominent writers expressed frustration at the ongoing push for blog page views. Reuters’ Felix Salmon explored the tension between quality and quantity online, while TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about the “systemic” problem of subpar content. Both pieces argue from the same starting position: There’s a lot of online content that is of low quality produced at high frequency.
In retrospect, this was a predictable terminus of a long path, one that has made clear the difference between news and journalism. News is a thing that happens. Journalism is the process of uncovering and analyzing news.
Blogs have been targeting news. That’s starting to change.
One hundred years ago, the fastest way to share pieces of news was the newspaper. The medium is relatively bad at it. Column inches require added information, analysis and assessment. The fact that the newspaper came out daily invented a craft and made the process of journalism feasible. Fifty years ago, the medium was television: punchier, quicker turnaround. Then, in the last decade, the Web. Blogs. Turnaround time measured in seconds. News fleshed out on an almost nonexistent time frame.
Now: Twitter. News breaks before people recognize that it’s newsworthy. Context or additional news comes in subsequent tweets. Eventually, journalists write blogs or newspaper articles about news that has already broken.
The story of the media’s evolution has been of reduction: reduced size, reduced speed, reduced context. The problem Salmon and Siegler identify may be, in part, this: Blog posts are too long for the news. Journalists treat news like a gas, filling the container they’re given. And a blog is often too big a container for the news.
When Gawker’s Nick Denton in 2008 said that any good idea can be expressed in 200 words, it was not a popular opinion. The proclamation was derided as a symbol of the fatuousness of online news, but this was before Twitter. Short blurbs became the norm — and helped drive Gawker to enormous success. By the end of 2008, the site’s ad revenue had gone up 39 percent.
Media companies are businesses. They need a container that displays ads, which Twitter doesn’t. People justifiably bristle at being directed to a website to get a snippet of news that they could have seen in their Twitter feed. So savvy media enterprises are trying to figure out how to rebalance content sharing, how to create value in visiting a website. The backlash against blogging expressed by Salmon and Siegler on Monday was, largely, against blogs that don’t make that effort, blogs that simply lure people into viewing content on a website that isn’t worth the click.
There’s demonstrable value in moving the other direction. Last month, 7.23 million unique visitors went to Salon.com, making it the 631st most-visited property in America. In an open letter, editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman credited the site’s decision to reduce the number of posts, focusing instead on length and quality. Journalism, in other words. Deep dives on interesting subjects.
Gawker’s Denton now agrees. In a memo at the beginning of January, he outlined Gawker’s path forward: “We can afford for some writers to take time off from the news grind to work on a story or opinion piece that will transform the debate or win the Internet. It’s more satisfying both to writers and readers that way. Relentless and cynical traffic-trawling is bad for the soul.”
By the end of the month, Gawker reported its own record: 35.6 million unique visitors. This wasn’t primarily due to long-form reporting, to be sure, but it demonstrates that long-form innovation is sought even by successful outlets.
The problem with blogs isn’t only that what they present can be content-light — it’s that people often need less context than we think. People are comfortable with quick bites of news at the expense of journalism: quick to load, quick to read. People understand how to curate and seek out more information. News doesn’t always need or have time for long explanations. Forcing context to spur page views is bad customer service.
The universe of blogs may be beginning to separate into two types: those that churn news with ad-justifying content versus ones that use Twitter and short blog posts to provide news, while building an audience that consumes (and shares) long-form journalism.
Over time, the smart bet is on the latter. The former is in direct competition with Twitter.
Philip Bump is a writer covering the intersection of technology and the media for Mediaite and TheAtlantic.com. He lives in New York City.
