Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (23 page)

Preposterously faulty intuition like this can be seen across the web, on blogs and sites of all types. The pressure to keep content visually appealing and ready for impulse readers is a constant suppressant on length, regardless of what is cut to make it happen. In a University of Kentucky study of blogs about cancer, researchers found that a full 80 percent of the blog posts they analyzed contained fewer than five hundred words.
³
The average number of words per post was 335, short enough to make the articles on the
Huffington Post
seem like lengthy manuscripts. I don’t care what Nick Denton says; I’m pretty sure that the complexities of
cancer
can’t be properly expressed in 100 words. Or 200, or 335, or 500, for that matter.

Even the most skilled writer would have trouble conveying the side effects of chemotherapy or discussing the possibility of death with your children in just a handful of words. Yet here they are—the majority of posts barely filling it three pages, doubled spaced, in a twelve-point font. They wouldn’t even take three minutes to read.

People are busy, and computers are wrought with distraction. It would be crazy to think that blogs don’t adapt their content around these facts. The average time users spend on a site like
Jezebel
is a little over a minute. On the technology and personal efficiency blog
Lifehacker
, they can average less than ten seconds. The common wisdom is that the site has one second to make the hook.
One second.
The bounce rate on blogs, or the percentage of people who leave the site immediately, without clicking anything, is incredibly high. Analysis of news sites has the average bounce rate pushing well north of 50 percent. When the statistics show a medium to be so fickle that half the audience starts leaving as soon as they get there, there is no question that this dynamic is going to seriously impact content choices.

Studies that have tracked the eye movements of people browsing the web show the same fickleness. The biggest draw of eyeballs is the headline, of which viewers usually see only the first few words before moving on. After users break off from the headline their glance tends to descend downward along the left hand column, scanning for sentences that catch their attention. If nothing does, they leave. What slows this dismissive descent is the form of the article—small, short paragraphs (one to two sentences versus three to five) seem to encourage slightly higher reading rates, as does a bolded introduction or subheadline (occasionally called a deck). What blogger is going to decide they’re above gimmicks such as bulleted lists when it’s precisely those gimmicks that seem to keep readers on the page for a few priceless seconds longer?

Jakob Nielsen, the reigning guru of web usability, according to
Fortune
magazine, and the author of twelve books on the subject, advises sites to follow a simple rule: Forty percent of every article must be cut.
⁴
But despair not, because according to his calculations, when chopped thus the average article loses only 30 percent of its value.
Oh, only 30 percent!
It’s the kind of math publishers go through every day. As long as the equation works out in their favor, it’s worth doing. What does it matter if the readers get stuck with the losses?

Once at a lunch meeting with an editor of
Racked NY
, a blog about retail shopping in New York City, the incredibly influential blogger told me that she did all her shopping online. “So you wear our clothes but you never go in our stores?” I asked, since she was wearing American Apparel at the meeting. “I just don’t have time to go shopping anymore.” There was a store within blocks of her office and two others on her way home. This was
literally
her beat. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway; where would she put personal observations in a two-hundred-word post even if she had them?

I once watched as blogger doing a story on me for the site
Mediagazer
tried to do her fact-checking by simply tweeting out into the universe. After watching her hilarious attempts to “verify [my] credibility” by asking people I’ve never worked with and never met, I finally logged onto Twitter to send my first message in years: “@LyraMckee Have you thought about emailing me?
[email protected]
.”

Why would she? Though I’d actually be able to answer her questions, tweeting out loud was easier than e-mailing me, and it meant she didn’t have to wait for my response. Plus, I’m boring and would have rained all over her speculation parade.

When Nielsen talks about cutting 40 percent of an article, actually knowing anything about what they’re talking about is what bloggers leave on the cutting-room floor. As a manipulator, that’s fine with me. It makes it easier to spin or even to lie. It’s not like I have to worry about them verifying it. They don’t have time for anything like that. A writer has minimums they must hit, and chasing a story that won’t make it on the site is an expensive error. So it’s not surprising that bloggers stick to eight hundred or fewer word posts about stories they
know
will generate traffic.

Jack Fuller, a former editor and publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, once admonished a group of newspaper editors by saying, “I don’t know about your world, but the one I live in does not shape itself so conveniently to anybody’s platform.”
⁵
For bloggers it would be nice if life was all exciting headlines and a clean eight hundred words, and happened to self-organize all its juicy bits down the left-hand column. The world is far too messy, too nuanced and complicated, and frankly far less exciting for that to be the case. Only a fool addicted to his laptop would fail to see that the material demanded by the constraints of their medium and the one reality gives them rarely match.

On the other hand, I quite like these fools.

MAKING LEMONADE

Let’s just say Fuller’s advice does not have a wide following online, particularly his reminder that reporters owe a “duty to reality, not to platforms.”

In fact, bloggers believe the opposite. And that sucks for everyone—except me, when I am doing my job. Because once you understand the limitations of the platform, the constraints can be used against the people who depend on it. The technology can be turned on itself.

I remember promoting one author whose book had just spent five weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list (meaning people were willing to
pay
for it in one medium). When I was trying to post material from the book on various popular blogs, it became clear that it was just too long. So we got rid of the thoroughness and the supporting arguments and reduced it down to the most basic, provocative parts. One chapter—the same chapter people enjoyed fully in book form—had to be split up into
eight
separate posts. To get attention we had to cut it up into itty-bitty bites and spoon-feed it to readers and bloggers like babies.

If a blogger isn’t willing or doesn’t have the time to get off their ass to visit the stores they write about, that’s their problem. It makes it that much easier to create my own version of reality. I will come to them with the story. I’ll meet them on their terms, but their story will be filled with my terms. They won’t take the time or show the interest to check with anyone else.

Blogs must—economically and structurally—distort the news in order for the format to work. As businesses, blogs can see the world through no other lens. The
format
is the problem. Or the perfect opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

XII

TACTIC #9

JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT)

THE WORLD IS BORING, BUT THE NEWS IS EXCITING. IT’S a paradox of modern life. Journalists and bloggers are not magicians, but if you consider the material they’ve got to work with and the final product they crank out day in and day out, you must give them some credit. Shit becomes sugar.

If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is testament to their skill. High-profile bloggers rightly take great pride in this ability. This pride and this pressure is what we media manipulators use against them. Pride goeth before the fall.

No matter how dull, mundane, or complex a topic may be, a good reporter must find the angle. Bloggers, descended from these journalists, have to take it to an entirely new level. They need to find not only the angle but the click-driving headline, an eye-catching image; generate comments and links; and in some cases, squeeze in some snark. And they have to do it up to a dozen times a day without the help of an editor. They can smell the angle of a story like a shark smells blood in the water. Because the better the angle, the more the blogger gets paid.