Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (19 page)

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RSS readers Bloglines and NewsGator are in the deadpool. Apple’s Mountain Lion OS X doesn’t include RSS, and Google no longer features Reader in its top-level navigation. The latest versions of the Firefox browser don’t even have RSS buttons. Twitter and Facebook both stopped supporting direct RSS feeds. And the death of RSS has been heralded in a million headlines.

IX

TACTIC #6

MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE

FOR MEDIA THAT LIVES AND DIES BY CLICKS (THE ONE-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It’s what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine. In a one-off world there is nothing more important than the pitch to prospective buyers. And they need many exciting new pitches every day, each louder and more compelling than the last. Even if reality is not so interesting.

That’s where I come in. I make up the news; blogs make up the headline.

Although it seems easy, headline writing is an incredibly difficult task. The editor has to reduce an entire story down to just a few units of text—turning a few hundred- or thousand-word piece into just a few words, period. In the process it must express the article’s central ideas in an exciting way.

According to Gabriel Snyder, the former managing editor of Gawker Media and now an editor at the traffic powerhouse
TheAtlantic.com
, blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.” Readers and revenue depend on the headline’s ability to win this fight.

In the days of the yellow press the front pages of the
World
and the
Journal
went head to head every day, driving each other to greater and greater extremes. As a publisher, William Randolph Hearst obsessed over his headlines, tweaking their wording, writing and rewriting them, riding his editors until they were perfect. Each one, he thought, could steal another one hundred readers away from another paper.
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It worked. As a young man Upton Sinclair remembered hearing the newsboys shouting “Extra!” and saw the headline “War Declared!” splashed across the front page of Hearst’s
New York Evening Journal.
He parted with his hard-earned pennies and read eagerly, only to find something rather different between what he’d thought and what he’d bought. It was actually: “War (may be) Declared (soon).”
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They won, he lost. That same hustle happens online every day. Each blog is competing not just to be
the
leader on a particular story but against all the other topics a reader could potentially commit to reading about (and also against checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and watching videos, or even pornography). So here we are in 2012, on our fancy MacBooks and wireless Internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.

From today:
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Naked Lady Gaga Talks Drugs and Celibacy

Hugh Hefner: I Am Not a Sex Slave Rapist in a Palace of Poop

The Top Nine Videos of Babies Farting and/or Laughing with Kittens

How Justin Bieber Caught a Contagious Syphilis Rumor

WATCH: Heartbroken Diddy Offers to Expose Himself to Chelsea Handler

Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life

Penguin Shits on Senate Floor

Now compare those to some of these classic headlines from 1898 to 1903:

WAR WILL BE DECLARED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES

AN ORGY OF GRAY-HAIRED MEN, CALLOW YOUTHS, GAMBLERS, ROUGHS, AND PAINTED WOMEN—GENERAL DRUNKENNESS—FIGHTS AT INTERVALS—IT WAS VICE’S CARNIVAL.

COULDN’T SELL HIS EAR, OLD MAN SHOOTS HIMSELF

OWL FRIGHTENS WOMAN TO DEATH IN HOSPITAL

BULLDOG TRIES TO KILL YOUNG GIRL HE HATES

CAT GAVE TENANTS NIGHTLY “CREEPS”

As magician Ricky Jay once put it, “People respond to and are deceived by the same things they were a hundred years ago.” Only today the headlines aren’t being yelled on busy street corners but on noisy news aggregators and social networks.

In a subscription model the headlines of any one article compete only with the other articles included in the publication. The articles on the front page compete with those on the inside pages, and perhaps with the notion of putting down the paper entirely, but they do not, for the most part, compete head to head with the front pages of other newspapers. The subscription takes care of that—you already made your choice. As a result, the job of the headline writer for media consumed by subscription is relatively easy. The reader has already paid for the publication, so they’ll probably read the content in front of them.

The predicament of an online publisher today is that it has no such buffer. Its creative solution, as it was one hundred years ago, is exaggeration and lies and bogus tags like EXLUSIVE, EXTRA, UNPRECEDENTED,
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and PHOTOS in the requisite CAPITAL LETTERS. They overstate their stories, latching on to the most compelling angles and parading themselves in front of the public like a prostitute. They are more than willing for PR people and marketers to be their partners in crime.

PICK ME, PICK ME!

In 1971, the
New York Times
, a subscription paper, had a big story on their hands. A disillusioned government analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of documents, now known as the Pentagon Papers, proving that the United States had systematically deceived the public and the world to go to war with Vietnam.

Could a one-off paper have gotten away with this headline: “Vietnam Archive: A Consensus to Bomb Developed Before ’64 Election, Study Says”?

Because that’s what the
New York Times
ran, still successfully reaching everyone in the country with the big news. They could afford to be reasoned, calm, and circumspect while still aggressively pursuing the story, despite the shameful efforts of the U.S government to block its publication. The truth and significance of the Pentagon Papers were enough.

Compare this to a headline I conned
Jezebel
into writing for a nonevent: “Exclusive: American Apparel’s Rejected Halloween Costume Ideas (American Appalling).”
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It did nearly one hundred thousand pageviews. Not only was the headline overstated, the leak was
fake
. I just had one of my employees send over some extra photos I couldn’t use for legal reasons.

Outside of the subscription model, headlines are not intended to represent the contents of articles but to
sell
them
—to win the fight for attention against an infinite number of other blogs or papers. It must so captivate the customer that they click or plunk down the money to buy it. Each headline competes with every other headline. On a blog, every page is the front page. It’s no wonder that the headlines of the yellow press and the headlines of blogs run to such extremes. It is a desperate fight. Life or death.

Newspapers from the stable period not only had plainly stated headlines, but they also had a tradition of witty headlines. Readers had time to get subtle jokes. Things are a little different now. As they say, Google doesn’t laugh. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, Google News sends more than a billion clicks a month to newspapers and another three billion clicks through its search and other services. In other words, Google’s sense of humor matters the most.
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Follow a story through Google News and you’ll see. The service begins by displaying twenty or so main news stories from which a reader may choose. I may read one article, or I may read five, but I likely will not read all, so each one vies for my attention—to scream, in so many words, “Pick Me! Pick Me! Pick Me!” Google News displays the story from a handful of outlets under each of those bold headlines. If the main headline is from CNN, the smaller headlines underneath may be from Fox News or the
Washington Post
or Wikipedia or TalkingPointsMemo. Each outlet’s headline screams “Pick Me! Pick Me!” and Google alludes to the rest of the iceberg lurking beneath under these chosen few: “All 522 news articles.” How does one stand out against five hundred other articles? Its scream of “No, Pick Me! Pick Me!” must be the loudest and most extreme.

Andrew Malcolm, creator of the
Los Angeles Times
’s massive
Top of the Ticket
political blog (thirty-three million readers in two years), specifically asks himself before writing a headline, “How can we make our item stick out from all the other ones?” And from this bold approach to editorial ethics comes proud headlines such as: “Hillary Clinton Shot a Duck Once” and “McCain Comes Out Against Deadly Nuclear Weapons, Obama Does Too.” I’m not cherry-picking:
That’s what he chose to brag about in a book of advice to aspiring bloggers.