Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (20 page)

“We do ironic headlines, smart headlines, and work hard to make very serious stories as interesting as we can,” Arianna Huffington told the
New York Times
.
⁵
“We pride ourselves on bringing in our community on which headlines work best.”

They also do their headlines in a massive thirty-two-point font. By best, Huffington does not mean the one that represents the story better. The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more than the others?” The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader. Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, tests more than forty-five thousand unique combinations of story headlines and photos every five minutes.
⁶
They too pride themselves in how they display the best four main stories they can, but I don’t think their complicated, four-years-in-the-making algorithm shares any human’s definition of that word.

SPELLING IT OUT FOR THEM

It should be clear what types of headlines blogs are interested in. It’s not pretty, but if that’s what they want, give it to them. You don’t really have a choice. They aren’t going to write about you, your clients, or your story unless it can be turned into a headline that will drive traffic.

You figured out the best way to do this when you were twelve years old and wanted something from your parents: Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline—or hint at the options—in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them steal it. Make it so obvious and enticing that there is no way they can pass it up. Hell, make them tone it down. They’ll be so happy to have the headline that they won’t bother to check whether it’s true or not.

Their job is to think about the headline above all else. The medium and their bosses force them to. So that’s where you make the sale. Only the reader gets stuck with the buyer’s remorse.

*
My favorite: The
Washington Post
accidentally published a headline to an article about weather preparedness: “SEO Headline Here” (SEO stands for search engine optimization).

*
This one is my favorite, because the thing always happens to be not only
not
unprecedented but hilariously pedestrian.

X

TACTIC #7

KILL ’EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS

THE BREAKTHROUGH FOR BLOGGING AS A BUSINESS was the ability to track what gets read and what doesn’t. From
Gawker
to
The Guardian
, sites of all sizes are open about their dependence on pageview statistics for editorial decisions.

Editors and analysts know what spreads, what draws traffic, and what doesn’t, and they direct their employees accordingly. The
Wall Street Journal
uses traffic data to decide which articles will be displayed on its homepage and for how long. Low-tracking articles are removed; heat-seeking articles get moved up. A self-proclaimed web-first paper like the
Christian Science Monitor
scours Google Trends for story ideas that help the paper “ride the Google wave.” Places like Yahoo! and Demand Media commission their stories in real time based on search data. Other sites take topics trending on Twitter and Techmeme and scurry to get a post up in order to be included in the list of articles for a particular event. Even tiny one-person blogs eagerly check their stat counters for the first sign of a spike.

Bloggers publish constantly in order to hit their pageview goals or quotas, so when you can give them something that gets them even one view closer to that goal, you’re serving their interests while serving yours. To ignore these numbers in an era of pageview journalism is business suicide for bloggers and media manipulators. And anything that pervasive presents opportunities for abuse.

I see it like this: The Top 10 “Most Read” or “Most Popular” section that now exists on most large websites is a compass for the editors and publishers. Mess with the magnet inside the compass and watch as its owner goes wildly off track.

As economists love to say: incentives matter. What makes the Most Popular or Most E-mailed leaderboard on
Salon.com
or the
New York Times
is a clear directive that tells writers what kinds of stories to head toward. It doesn’t matter that the stories suck or if they have nothing to do with the publisher’s mission. This is about getting pageviews—by whatever means.

THE DISTURBING SCIENCE

Yellow papers had their own circulation dragons; instead of celebrity slideshows, these papers had staples like hating black people, preposterous Wall Street conspiracies, and gruesome rape and murder stories. But while in the past decisions were guided by an editor’s intuitive sense of what would pander to their audience, today it is a science.

Sites employ full-time data analysts to ensure that the absolute worst is brought out of the audience.
Gawker
displays its stats on a big screen in the middle of their newsroom. The public can look at it too at
Gawker.com/stats
. Millions of visitors and millions of dollars are to be had from content and traffic analysis. It just happens that these statistics become the handles by which manipulators can pick up and hijack the news.

It’s too transparent and simple for that not to be the case. For some blog empires, the content-creation process is now a pageview-centric checklist that asks writers to think of everything
except
“Is what I am making any good?” AOL is one of these organizations, as it emphatically (and embarrassingly) outlined in a memo titled “The AOL Way.” If writers and editors want to post something on the AOL platform they must ask themselves:

How many pageviews will this content generate? Is this story SEO-winning for in-demand terms? How can we modify it to include more terms? Can we bring in contributors with their own followers? What CPM will this content earn? How much will this content cost to produce? How long will it take to produce
?
¹

And other such stupid questions.

Even the famed
New Yorker
writer Susan Orlean has admitted her gravitational pull toward the stories on the Most Popular lists, as a reader and as writer. “Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me?” she writes.

Does it mean it’s a good story or just a seductive one? Isn’t my purpose on this earth, at least professionally, precisely to read the most unpopular stories? Shouldn’t I ignore this list? Shouldn’t I roam through the news unconcerned and maybe even uninformed of how many other people read this same news and “voted” for it
?
²

But in the end these guilty pangs cannot win out. Amid the clutter and chaos of a busy site, the lists pop. The headlines scream out to be clicked. Those articles seem more interesting than everything else. Plus, hey, they appear to be vetted by the rest of the world. That can occasionally be a good thing, as Orlean points out, but is it worth it?

Sometimes they contain a nice surprise, a story I might not have noticed otherwise. Sometimes they simply confirm the obvious, the story you know is in the air and on everybody’s mind.
Never do they include a story that is quiet and ordinary but wonderful to read.
[emphasis mine]

That great insight is often buried in material that seems quiet and ordinary does not matter to blogging. That wouldn’t get clicks.

I’m fond of a line by Nicolas Chamfort, a French writer, who believed that popular public opinion was the absolute worst kind of opinion. “One can be certain,” he said, “that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority.” To a marketer, it’s just as well, because idiocy is easier to create than anything else.