Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (18 page)

This realization was a common occurrence during the writing of this book. I often felt I could take media criticism written one hundred years ago, change a few words, and describe exactly how blogs work. Knowing the trademarks of yellow journalism from this era made it possible for me to know how to give blogs what they “want” in this era. But more on that later.

As the daily sales of these papers soared, they become incredibly attractive opportunities for advertisers, particularly with the advent of large corporations and department stores. The rates these new advertisers paid propelled newspapers to boost readership even more.

Master promoters like Bennett, Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst delivered. Their skyrocketing circulations were driven by one thing: escalating sensationalism. Welcome to the intersection of the One-Off Problem and ad-driven journalism.

THE MODERN STABLE PRESS (BY SUBSCRIPTION)

Just as James Gordon Bennett embodied the era of sensational yellow journalism, another man, Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the
New York Times
, ushered in the next iteration of news.

Ochs, like most great businessmen, understood that doing things differently was the way to great wealth. In the case of his newly acquired newspaper and the dirty, broken world of yellow journalism, he made the pronouncement that “decency meant dollars.”

He immediately set out to change the conditions that allowed the Bennett, Hearst, Pulitzer, and their imitators to flourish. He was the first publisher to solicit subscriptions via telephone. He offered contests to his salesman. He gave them quotas and goals for the number of subscribers they were expected to bring in.

He understood that people bought the yellow papers because they were cheap—and they didn’t have any other options. He felt that if they had a choice, they’d pick something better. He intended to be that option. First, he would match his competitors’ prices, and then he would deliver a paper that far surpassed the value implied by the low price.

It worked. When he dropped the price of the
Times
to one cent, circulation tripled in the first year. He would compete on content. He came up with the phrase “All the News That’s Fit to Print” as a mission statement for the editorial staff, two months after taking over the paper. The less known runner-up says almost as much: “All the World’s News, But Not a School for Scandal.”

I don’t want to exaggerate. The transition to a stable press was by no means immediate, and it didn’t immediately transform the competition. But subscription did set forth new conditions in which the newspaper and the newspaperman had incentives more closely aligned with the needs of their readers. The end of that wave of journalism meant that papers were sold to readers by subscriptions, and all the ills of yellow journalism have swift repercussions in a subscription model: Readers who are misled unsubscribe; errors must be corrected in the following day’s issue; and the needs of the newsboys no longer drove the daily headlines.

A subscription model—whether it’s music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed. Since articles don’t have to spread on their own, but rather as part of the unit (the whole newspaper or album or collection), publishers do not need to exploit valence to drive single-use buyers.

With Ochs’s move, reputation began to matter more than notoriety. Reporters started social clubs, where they critiqued one another’s work. Some began talk of unionizing. Mainly they began to see journalism as a profession, and from this they developed rules and codes of conduct. The professionalization of journalism meant applying new ideas to how stories were found, written, and presented. For the first time, it created a sense of obligation, not just to the paper and circulation, but also to the audience.

Just as Bennett had his imitators, so did Ochs. In fact, the press has imitated the principles he built into the
New York Times
since he took it over. Even now, when someone buys a paper at a newsstand, they don’t survey the headlines and buy the most sensational. They buy the paper they trust—the same goes for what radio stations they listen to and television news they watch. This is the subscription model, the brand model, invented by Ochs, internalized. It is selling on subscription and not by the story.

I’m not saying it is a perfect system by any means. I don’t want to imply that newspapers in the twentieth century were paragons of honesty or accuracy or embraced change immediately. As late at the 1970s, papers like the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
were still heavily dependent on street and newsstand sales, and thus continued to play up and sensationalize crime stories.

The subscription model may have been free of the corruptive influence of the masses, but that didn’t spare it from corruption from the top. As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel
The Long Goodbye
:

Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.

This was incisive media criticism (in fiction, no less) that was later echoed with damning evidence by theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian. A friend put it more bluntly: “Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.”

At least there was once an open discussion about the problems of the media. Today, the toxic economics of blogs are not only obscured, but tech gurus on the take actually defend them. We have the old problems
plus
a host of new ones.

THE DEATH OF SUBSCRIPTION, REBIRTH OF MEDIA MANIPULATION

For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. This One-Off Problem is exactly like the one faced by the yellow press a century or more ago, and it distorts today’s news just as it did then—only now it’s amplified by millions of blogs instead of a few hundred newspapers. As Eli Pariser put it in
The Filter Bubble,
when it comes to news on the Internet:

Each article ascends the most-forwarded lists or dies an ignominious death on its own…. The attention economy is ripping the binding, and the pages that get read are the pages that are frequently the most topical, scandalous, and viral.

People don’t read one blog. They read a constant assortment of many blogs, and so there is little incentive to build trust. Competition for readers is on a per-article basis, taking publishers right back to the (digital) street corner, yelling, “War Is Coming!” to sell papers. It takes them back to making things up to fill the insatiable need for new news.

Instead of being a nineteenth-century press agent manipulating newspapers, I am a twenty-first-century press agent manipulating blogs. The tactics are the same, but I ply my trade with more influence, less oversight, and faster results than ever imagined. I got all sorts of great inspiration (and ideas) for the job by reading old books like
The Harder They Fall
and
All the King’s Men
, which are about press agents and media fixers for powerful politicians and criminals of many years ago. You want to know how to con bloggers today? Look at media hoaxes from before your grandparents were born. The same things will play. They may even play better now.

Think about how we consume blogs. It is
not
by subscription. The only viable subscription method for blogs, RSS, is dead. For some of you who still religiously use an RSS reader, it might feel strange to hear me speak about it in the past tense, but RSS has died.
*
And so has the concept of subscribing.

Just look at the top referring sources of traffic to major websites and blogs. Cumulatively, these referring sources almost always account for more visitors than the site’s direct traffic (i.e., people who typed in the URL). Though it varies from site to site, the biggest sources of traffic are, usually, in this order: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The viewers were sent directly to a specific article for a disposable purpose: they’re not subscribers; they are seekers or glancers.

This is great news for a media manipulator, bad news for everyone else. The death of subscription means that instead of attempting to provide value to you, the longtime reader, blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—the mythical reader out in viral land. Instead of providing quality day in and day out, writers chase big hits like a sexy scandal or a funny video meme. Bloggers aren’t interested in building up consistent, loyal readerships via RSS or paid subscriptions, because what they really need are the types of stories that will do hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews. They need stories that will sell.

A popular article on the technology blog
Ars Technica
blares the headline: “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.”
¹
Poisonous? What sounds poisonous to me is the writer’s newly RSS-free life, which included scanning social media and new aggregators at constant intervals throughout the day, because she knew “if something
truly important or controversial blew up
, I’d hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers” [emphasis mine].

Blogs must fight to be that story. You can provide them the ammunition. Getting something “controversial” to blow up is easy, and it’s the tactic I prefer to use over doing something “important.” With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell—so that’s what we sell them.

Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.

Inside the chaos, it is easy to mislead. Only the exciting, sensational stuff finds readers—the stories that “blow up.” Reporters don’t have time for follow-ups or reasoned critiques, only quick hits. Blogs are all chasing the same types of stories, the mass media chase blogs, and the readers are following both of them—and everyone is led astray.

The reason subscription (and RSS) was abandoned was because in a subscription economy the users are in control. In the one-off model, the competition might be more vicious, but it is on the terms of the publisher. Having followers instead of subscribers—where readers have to check back on sites often and are barraged with a stream of refreshing content laden with ads—is much better for their bottom line.

RSS never became truly mainstream for this reason. It’s antithetical to the interests of the people who would need to push readers toward using it. It comes as no surprise that despite glowing reports from satisfied readers and major investments from Google and others that it would not be able to make it. So today, as RSS buttons disappear from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.

*
Day invented the Help Wanted and Classifieds sections around this time. It was a highly effective way to drive daily sales.

*
In other words, we’ve been tearing down public figures on bogus charges for more than a century. Do yourself a favor and look up the Fatty Arbuckle scandal for a sobering look at One-Off consequences.