by Ryan Holiday
Now, these things were true, but still, I deliberately framed them in the most sympathetic way. I made it seem like I couldn’t afford the tickets (I could) and I was clearly very biased—I was angry and wanted to get back at someone. The result: A week later, a front-page story in the Times-Picayune, featuring the picture I’d taken and my bully quote in huge block letters, which spurred hundreds of comments and a ton of other coverage. A month later, the city announced it was changing course on the policy and state legislators debated banning the cameras altogether. Of course, I’ve also seen it go the other direction. A disgruntled ex-employee can make themselves seem very sympathetic, and reporters rarely ask why this person might be suddenly so eager to talk to them. This is something companies need to be very careful about.
I once gave a talk to an association of pork farmers about this very issue. They were tired of being slammed in the press by vegetarians and other animal rights activists. I’m not a supporter of factory farming, but I empathized with their position. Biased sources were always going to be more sympathetic as sources than big rich farmers ever will be. The same thing was true about the Gawker story I mentioned above—the writer was actively looking for disgruntled ex-employees of BuzzFeed to anonymously attack their old company.
FORGETTING MY OWN BULLSHIT
As I was gathering up press done on me personally over the years, I came across an article I’d forgotten. I’d posted a question on my blog: “What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?” It was a discussion I’d had with several friends; we were wondering what book teachers would assign to students to learn about this era fifty years from now. This discussion was picked up and featured by Marginal Revolution, a blog by the economist Tyler Cowen, which does about fifty thousand pageviews a day. His post said:
What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?
BY TYLER COWEN ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2008 AT 6:42 PM IN BOOKS | PERMALINK
That’s Ryan Holiday’s query. This is not about quality, this is about “representing a literary era” or perhaps just representing the era itself. I’ll cite Bonfire of the Vanities and Fight Club as the obvious picks. Loyal MR reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis (“though not American Psycho”). How about you? Dare I mention John Grisham’s The Firm as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy, and others? There’s always Harry Potter and graphic novels.
Coming across this struck me not only because I am a big Tyler Cowen fan but because I am also Jeff Ritze. Or was, since that’s one of the fake names I used to use and had apparently e-mailed my post as a tip to Marginal Revolution. Of course Jeff Ritze was thinking about Bret Easton Ellis—he’s one of my favorite authors. I even answered a variant of that question as me—Ryan Holiday—a few years later for a magazine that was interviewing me.
I had been the source of this article and totally forgotten about it. I wanted traffic for my site, so I tricked Tyler, and he linked to me. (Sorry, Tyler!) It paid off too. A blog for the Los Angeles Times picked up the discussion from Cowen’s blog and talked positively about “twentysomething Ryan Holiday.” Marginal Revolution is a widely read and influential blog, and I never would have popped up on the Los Angeles Times’s radar without it. Best of all, now, when I write my bio, I get to list the Los Angeles Times as one of the places I’ve gotten coverage. Score.*
NO TIME TO CHECK
Why did Jeff Ritze manage to appear as a media source? Why did Ryan Holiday, the guy writing a book on media manipulation, not raise any flags on HARO? Because no one has time to check these things out. Epstein’s line about journalists being wholly dependent on sources was true in 1975, but over forty years later, bloggers are even more dependent and have even less time for vetting.
At the New York Observer, where I am an editorial adviser, it has been exhausting to watch pranksters and liars prey on reporters. In 2015 a marketing agency named Boogie created an April Fool’s prank around an app called Chute, which apparently prevented your iPhone from breaking. The only problem was that they pulled this prank in March. The founder played a convincing character and told a compelling story, which the company then revealed and apologized for after the story ran. A year or so later, another hoax occurred over a Kickstarter campaign for a fake app called Adoptly (essentially Tinder for adoption and fostering).
What the Observer writer explained in her piece about falling for the first hoax explains what a tough position reporters are in:
The Observer regrets our error. We admit we should have spotted a few red flags, like Chute’s limited Twitter following, and the fact that Chute’s “ founder” sounded oddly monotone when we interviewed him over the phone.
But we must note that unlike several recent media stunts, our story on Chute was not the product of overly credulous re-blogging. Boogie constructed an entire landing page and imaginary founder of the app, replete with screenshots and mock-ups of the product. The Observer interviewed the fictitious founder, played by Boogie’s in-house product manager, but he lied over the phone, and in his answers to follow-up questions via email.
While there were some red flags, writers don’t have time to check all of them. In 1975 a reporter might have had a few days to work on a piece; now they have a few minutes. There is also a complicated dance between the source and the reporter. A source is interested in seeing the story happen because it’s good for their business, and often the blogger is interested in seeing it go the exact same way—because their business is publishing stories, not saying no to potential scoops. They suspend disbelief because it’s good for business.
I like to point out a Gizmodo story where the site fell for a hoax and got thirty thousand pageviews for its poorly researched story headlined malfunctioning cake ruins party and spews liquor all over oil tycoons.3 They then followed up after the prank was revealed with a story titled viral video of shell oil party disaster is fake, unfortunately and got ninety thousand pageviews out of it.4 That’s two stories instead of zero—so do you see why they don’t question sources?
Manipulators and self-promoters, on the other hand, pray this kind of due diligence never happens. And sadly, they know it likely won’t.
*I hope you can also see how a deliberate leak could be used to create a distraction *cough* Trump’s 2005 tax returns *cough*. Who would resist? Even if the intentions are so transparent, a juicy enough scoop can’t be ignored.
*On occasion I have instructed a client to say something in an interview, knowing that once it is covered we can insert it into Wikipedia, and it will become part of the standard media narrative about them. We seek out interviews in order to advance certain “facts,” and then we make them doubly real by citing them on Wikipedia.
*Ten days later the reporter generously gave a second marketer a chance at the same story, with this request: “URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@aol.com needs NEW or LITTLE known app or website that can help families with young kids save money.”
*To make it weirder, I saw recently that someone else using the name Jeff Ritzo left a negative review on Amazon about one of my books.
VI
TACTIC #3
GIVE ’EM WHAT SPREADS
Study the top stories at Digg or MSN.com and you’ll notice a pattern: the top stories all polarize people. If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs—behavior, belief, or belongings—you get a huge virus-like dispersion.
—TIM FERRISS, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately.
—KURT WOLFF, PUBLISHER OF FRANZ KAFKA
THE ADVICE THAT MIT MEDIA STUDIES PROFESSOR Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” With social sharing comes traffic, and with traffic comes money. Content that isn’t shared isn’t worth anything.
For someone tasked with advancing narratives in the media, the flip side of this advice is equally straightforward: If it spreads, you’re go
lden. Blogs don’t have the resources to advertise their posts, and bloggers certainly don’t have the time to work out a publicity launch for something they’ve written. Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own and get attention, links, and new readers with the least work possible. Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn’t even register on their list of priorities.
If the quality of their content doesn’t matter to bloggers, do you think it’s going to matter to marketers? It’s never mattered to me. So I design what I sell to bloggers based on what I know (and they think) will spread. I give them what they think will go viral online—and make them money.
A TALE OF TWO CITY SLIDESHOWS
If you’re like me, you’ve sat and stared in fascination at the pictures of the ruins of Detroit that get passed around the internet. We’ve all gaped at the stunning shots of the cavelike interior of the decaying United Artists Theater and the towering Michigan Central Station that resembles an abandoned Gothic cathedral. These beautiful high-res photo slideshows are impressive pieces of online photojournalism . . . or so you think.
Like everyone else, I ate up these slideshows, and I even harbored a guilty desire to go to Detroit and walk through the ruins. My friends know this and send me the newest ones as soon as they come out. When I see the photos I can’t help thinking of this line from Fight Club:
In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. . . . You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
To see a broken, abandoned American city is a moving, nearly spiritual experience, one you are immediately provoked to share with everyone you know.
A slideshow that generates a reaction like that is online gold. An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos. A recent twenty-picture display posted by the Huffington Post was commented on more than four thousand times and liked twenty-five thousand times on Facebook. And that was the second time they’d posted it. The New York Times’s website has two of their own, for a total of twenty-three photos. The Guardian’s website has a sixteen-pager. Time.com’s eleven-pager is the top Google result for “Detroit photos.” We’re talking about millions of views combined.
One would think that any photo of Detroit would be an instant hit online. Not so. A series of beautiful but sad photographs of fore-closed and crumbling Detroit houses and their haggard residents was posted on Magnum Photos’s site in 2009, well before most of the others. It shows the same architectural devastation, the same poverty and decline. While the slideshow on the Huffington Post received four thousand comments within days, these photos got twenty-one comments over two years.1
ONE SPREADS, THE OTHER DOESN’T
In an article in the New Republic called “The Case Against Economic Disaster Porn,” Noreen Malone points out that one thing stands out about the incredibly viral photographs of Detroit: Not a single one of the popular photos of the ruins of Detroit has a person in it. That was the difference between the Huffington Post slideshows and the Magnum photos—Magnum dared to include human beings in their photos of Detroit. The photos that spread, on the other hand, are deliberately devoid of any sign of life.2
Detroit has a homeless population of nearly twenty thousand, and in 2011 city funding for homeless shelters was cut in half. Thousands more live in foreclosed houses and buildings without electricity or heat, the very same structures in the pictures. These photos don’t just omit people. Detroit is a city overrun by stray dogs, which roam the city in packs hunting and scavenging for food. Conservative figures estimate that there are as many as 50,000 wild dogs living in Detroit and something like 650,000 feral cats. In other words, you can’t walk a block in Detroit without seeing heartbreaking and deeply wounded signs of life.
You’d have to try not to. And that’s exactly what these slideshow photographers do. Why? Because all that is depressing. As Jonah Peretti, the virality expert behind both the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, believes, “if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.” And since people wouldn’t share it, blogs won’t publish it. Seeing the homeless and drug addicts and starving, dying animals would take away all the fun.* It’d make the viewers feel uncomfortable, and unsettling images are not conducive to sharing. Why, Peretti asks, would anyone—bloggers or readers—want to pass along bad feelings?3
The economics of the web make it impossible to portray the complex situation in Detroit accurately. It turns out that photos of Detroit that spread do so precisely because they are dead. Simple narratives like the haunting ruins of a city spread and live, while complicated ones like a city filled with real people who desperately need help don’t.
One city. Two possible portrayals. One is a bummer; one looks cool. Only one makes it into the Huffington Post slideshow.
My point here is not sociological so much as it is practical. Let me explain how this ends up affecting companies and public figures. Say someone accuses you of something horrible—obviously those salacious allegations make for good copy. The problem is that the truth—your response—is often much less interesting than the accusations. Getting caught stepping out on a spouse might generate headlines. The fact that the marriage was long over, that you were both just waiting for the paperwork to be finished and, in fact, the spouse has moved on too—that’s starting to involve a lot of variables. It’s complicated. It’s boring. No one is getting excited to share that.
This is something I have to explain to clients in crisis PR situations all the time. I say, “Look, if your response isn’t more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother.” So a lot of times people end up having to take a lot of untrue crap because they don’t have much recourse with a media that cares more about what spreads than what is accurate. Or, worse, you get an escalation: Someone accuses someone of something. The person has to respond that it’s all made up and the person is only doing it because “[insert a different lie],” and it just goes round and round and round.
EXTREME VERSIONS OF REALITY
Look at a slideshow of Detroit and you might think the world is ending. Look at some headlines on Upworthy.com and you might be forgiven for thinking that the world is doing awesome. Because just as extreme negativity is one effective technique, so is cloying and saccharine positivity. Check out these headlines that did millions of views:
“Watch a Preacher Attack Gay Marriage and Totally Change His Mind on the Spot”
“A Message to Everyone Out There Who Thinks They Aren’t Beautiful in Pictures”
“She Tried to Kill Herself and It Didn’t Work. See How She Made All That into Something
Beautiful”
“She Didn’t Think the Love of Her Life Was Romantic Enough. Then She Looked out Her Office Window”
“Move Over, Barbie—You’re Obsolete”
If only the world were actually this way. . . .
Indeed, the site’s editors know that it is not. But folks at Upworthy are filtering and exclusively delivering only a small sliver of reality—one that is all sweet and no sweat. Even Upworthy’s pop-up message designed to snag e-mails is illustrative of their approach: “It’s nice to be reminded of the good in the world. And it should happen more often.” Then you give them your e-mail address and they begin to bombard you with “reminders.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, much of the media is obsessed with what might be called “outrage porn.” Here are a few headlines from Salon.com to prove my point.
“Patton Oswalt Makes Asian Name Joke, in Response to Racist KTVU N
ews Report”
“Another Portuguese Water Dog? The Obamas Should Have Made a Different Statement”
“The Onion Thinks Incest, Statutory Rape Is Hilarious”
“Gawker’s ‘Privilege Tournament’ Is All About White Anger”
“ ‘The Conjuring’: Right-wing, Woman-Hating and Really Scary”
Is the world terrible or is it awesome? Can’t these people just make up their minds? The press, Martin Amis once noted, “is more vicious than the populace.” It’s also more positive and gushy—as Upworthy is—than normal people. Why? Because it’s paid to be.
In 2010, Jonah Berger, an expert on virality at the Wharton School, looked at seven thousand articles that made it onto the New York Times Most E-mailed list. (A story from the Times is shared on Twitter once every four seconds, making the list one of the biggest media platforms on the web.) The researchers’ results confirm almost everything we see when content like the sensational ruin porn of Detroit goes viral.4 For me it confirmed every intuition behind my manipulations.
According to the study, “the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes” [emphasis mine]. I will say it again: The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger. Is it any surprise that there is so much anger-provoking content online, then? No wonder the outrage I created for Tucker’s movie worked so well. According to Berger’s study, anger has such a profound effect that one standard deviation increase in the anger rating of an article is the equivalent of spending an additional three hours as the lead story on the front page of NYTimes.com.