Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (22 page)

BREAKING THE NEWS

I don’t know if blogs enjoy being tricked. All I know is that they don’t care enough to put a stop to it. The response to sketchy anonymous tips, in my experience, is Thanks, a lot more often than Prove it.

Nobody is fooling anyone. That’s not the game—because sites don’t have any interest in what they post, as long as it delivers pageviews. Samuel Axon, formerly an editor at
Mashable
and
Engadget
, complained that the rules by which blogs get “traffic, high impressions, and strong ad revenues betray journalists and the people who need them at every turn.” This is only partially true. They betray the
ethical
journalists and earnest readers. As far as bloggers and publishers looking to get rich or manipulators eager to influence the news are concerned, the system is just fine.

Pageview journalism puffs blogs up and fattens them on a steady diet of guaranteed traffic pullers of a mediocre variety that require little effort to produce. It pulls writers and publishers to the extremes, and only to the extremes—the shocking and the already known. Practicing pageview journalism means that a publisher never has to worry about seeing “(0) Comments” at the bottom of a post. With tight deadlines and tight margins, any understanding of the audience is helpful guidance. For marketers, this is refreshingly predictable.

It just happens that this metric-driven understanding breaks the news. The cynicism is self-fulfilling and self-defeating; as the quip famously attributed to Henry Ford points out, if he’d listened to what his customers “said” they wanted, all “we’d have ended up with was a faster horse.”

Pageview journalism treats people by what they
appear
to want—from data that is unrepresentative to say the least—and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse. And then, when criticized, publishers throw up their hands as if to say, “We wish people liked better stuff too,” as if they had nothing to do with it.

Well, they do.

XI

TACTIC #8

USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF

SOMETIMES I SEE A PREPOSTEROUSLY INACCURATE blog post about a client (or myself) and I take it personally, thinking that it was malicious. Or I wonder why they didn’t just pick up the phone and call me to get the other side of the story. I occasionally catch myself complaining about sensational articles or crummy writing, and place the blame on an editor or a writer. It’s hard for me to understand the impulse to reduce an important issue to a stupid quote or unfunny one-liner.

This is an unproductive attitude. It forgets the structure and constraints of blogging as a medium and how these realities explain almost everything blogs do. Where there is little volition, there should be little bitterness or blame. Only understanding, which, I have learned, can be turned to advantage

The way news is found online more or less determines what is found. The way the news must be presented—in order to meet the technical constraints of the medium and the demands of its readers—determines the news itself. It’s basically a cliché at this point, but that doesn’t change the fact that Marshall McLuhan was right: The medium
is
the message.

Think about television. We’re all tired of the superficiality of cable news and its insistence on reducing important political issues into needless conflict between two annoying talking heads. But there’s a simple reason for this, as media critic Eric Alterman explained in
Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy
. TV is a visual medium, he said, so to ask for the audience to think about something it cannot see would be suicide. If it were possible to put an abstract idea to film, producers would happily show that instead of pithy soundbites. But it isn’t, so conflict, talking heads, and b-roll footage are all you’ll get. The values of television, Alterman realized, behave like a dictator, exerting their rule over the kind of information that can be transmitted across the channels.

Blogs aren’t any different. The way the medium works essentially predetermines what bloggers can publish and how exactly they must do it. Blogs are just as logical as the television producers Alterman criticized; it’s just a matter of understanding their unique logic.

To know what the medium demands of bloggers is to be able to predict, and then co-opt, how they act.

HEMMED IN ON ALL SIDES

Why do blogs constantly chase new stories? Why do they update so much? Why are posts so short? A look at their development makes it clear: Bloggers don’t have a choice.

Early bloggers, according to Scott Rosenberg in his book on the history of blogging,
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters
, had to answer one important question: How do our readers know what’s new?

To solve this, programmers first tried “New!” icons, but that didn’t work. It was too difficult to tell what the icons meant across many blogs—on one site “New!” might mean the latest thing published and on another it could be anything written within the last month. What they needed was a uniform way to organize the content that would be the same across the web. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the web, set a procedure in motion that would be copied by almost everyone after him: New stuff goes at the top.

The reverse chronological order on one of the web’s first sites—called “stacking” by programmers—became the de facto standard for blogging. Because the web evolved through imitation and collaboration, most sites simply adopted the form of their predecessors and peers. Stacking developed as an implicit standard, and that has had extraordinary implications. When content is stacked, it sets a very clear emphasis on the present. For the blogger, the time stamp is like an expiration date. It also creates considerable pressure to be short and immediate.

In 1996, three years before the word “blogger” was even invented, protoblogger Justin Hall wrote to his readers at
Links.net
that he’d been criticized at a party for not posting enough, and for not putting his posts right on the front page. “Joey said he used to love my pages,” Hall wrote, “but now there’s too many layers to my links. At
Suck(.com)
you get sucked in immediately, no layers to content.”
¹

It’s really an illustrative moment, if you think about it. In one of of the first data-stamped posts on a blog ever, Hall was already alluding to the pressures the medium was putting on content. His post was ninety-three words and basically a haiku. This was not a man of too many “layers.” But
Suck.com
had just sold for thirty thousand dollars, so who was Hall to argue? So he resolved to put “a little somethin’ new” at the top of his website every single day.

We can trace a straight line from this conversation in 1996 to the post-per-day minimums of blogs like
Gizmodo
and
Engadget
in 2005, and to today, when authors of guides like
Blogger Bootcamp
tell prospective bloggers that the experience of publishing more than twenty thousand blog posts taught them that “Rule #1” is “Always Be Blogging,” and that the best sites are “updated daily, if not hourly.”

Since content is constantly expiring, and bloggers face the Sisyphean task of trying to keep their sites fresh, creating a newsworthy event out of nothing becomes a daily occurrence. The structure of blogging warps the perspective of everyone who exists in this space—why would a blogger spend much time on a post that will very shortly be pushed below view? Understandably, no one wants to be the fool who wasted his or her time working on something nobody read. The message is clear: The best way to get traffic is to publish as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and as simply as possible.

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging
has a simple rule of thumb: Unless readers can see the end of your post coming around eight hundred words in, they’re going to stop. Scrolling is a pain, as is feeling like an article will never end. This gives writers around eight hundred words to make their point—a rather tight window. Even eight hundred words is pushing it, the
Huffington Post
says, since a block of text that big on the web can be intimidating. A smart blogger, they note, will break it up with graphics or photos, and definitely some links.

In a retrospective of his last ten years of blogging, publisher Om Malik of
GigaOM
bragged that he’d written over eleven thousand posts and 2 million words in the last decade. Which, while translating into three posts a day, means the average post was just 215 words long. But that’s nothing compared to the ideal
Gawker
item. Nick Denton told a potential hire in 2008 that it was “one hundred words long. Two hundred, max. Any good idea,” he said, “can be expressed at that length.”
²