by Ryan Holiday
I don’t want to exaggerate. The transition to a stable press was by no means immediate, and it didn’t immediately transform the competition. But subscription did set forth new conditions in which the newspaper and the newspaperman had incentives more closely aligned with the needs of their readers. The end of that wave of journalism meant that papers were sold to readers by subscriptions, and all the ills of yellow journalism have swift repercussions in a subscription model: Readers who are misled unsubscribe; errors must be corrected in the following day’s issue; and the needs of the news-boys no longer drive the daily headlines.
A subscription model—whether it’s music or news—offers necessary subsidies to the nuance that is lacking in the kind of stories that flourish in one-off distribution. Opposing views can now be included. Uncertainty can be acknowledged. Humanity can be allowed. Since articles don’t have to spread on their own, but rather as part of the unit (the whole newspaper or album or collection), publishers do not need to exploit valence to drive single-use buyers.
With Ochs’s move, reputation began to matter more than notoriety. Reporters started social clubs, where they critiqued one another’s work. Some began talk of unionizing. Mainly they began to see journalism as a profession, and from this they developed rules and codes of conduct. The professionalization of journalism meant applying new ideas to how stories were found, written, and presented. For the first time, it created a sense of obligation, not just to the paper and circulation, but also to the audience.
Just as Bennett had his imitators, so did Ochs. In fact, the press has imitated the principles he built into the New York Times since he took it over. Even now, when someone buys a paper at a newsstand, they don’t survey the headlines and buy the most sensational. They buy the paper they trust—the same goes for what radio stations they listen to and television news they watch. This is the subscription model, the brand model, invented by Ochs, internalized. It is selling on subscription and not by the story.
I’m not saying it is a perfect system by any means. I don’t want to imply that newspapers in the twentieth century were paragons of honesty or accuracy or embraced change immediately. As late as the 1970s, papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune were still heavily dependent on street and newsstand sales, and thus continued to play up and sensationalize crime stories.
The subscription model may have been free of the corruptive influence of the masses, but that didn’t spare it from corruption from the top. As the character Philip Marlowe observed in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye:
Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners.
This was incisive media criticism (in fiction, no less) that was later echoed with damning evidence by theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian. A friend put it more bluntly: “Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.”
At least there was once an open discussion about the problems of the media. Today, not only are the toxic economics of blogs obscured, but tech gurus on the take actually defend them. We have the old problems plus a host of new ones.
THE DEATH OF SUBSCRIPTION, REBIRTH OF MEDIA MANIPULATION
For most of the last century, the majority of journalism and entertainment was sold by subscription (the third phase). It is now sold again online à la carte—as a one-off. Each story must sell itself, must be heard over all the others, be it in Google News, on Twitter, or on your Facebook wall. This One-Off Problem is exactly like the one faced by the yellow press a century or more ago, and it distorts today’s news just as it did then—only now it’s amplified by millions of blogs instead of a few hundred newspapers. As Eli Pariser put it in The Filter Bubble, when it comes to news on the internet,
each article ascends the most-forwarded lists or dies an ignominious death on its own. . . . The attention economy is ripping the binding, and the pages that get read are the pages that are frequently the most topical, scandalous, and viral.
People don’t read one blog. They read a constant assortment of many blogs, and so there is little incentive to build trust. Competition for readers is on a per-article basis, taking publishers right back to the (digital) street corner, yelling, “War Is Coming!” to sell papers. It takes them back to making things up to fill the insatiable need for new news.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert Caro (a former reporter for Newsday) was interviewed by a blog called Gothamist around his eightieth birthday. The reporter explained to him how journalism worked these days,
There’s something called Chartbeat—it shows you how many people are reading a specific article in any given moment, and how long they spend on that article. That’s called “engagement time.” We have a giant flatscreen on the wall that displays it, a lot of publications do.
Caro’s response was perfect: “What you just said is the worst thing I ever heard.”
The interview continues:
[Interviewer:] Headlines and other tools . . . are used to get people to click on an article. It reduces what might be a piece of nuanced writing to the most salacious tidbit. So The Power Broker might be headlined, “Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.” Or—and someone did this recently—you might try something like, “The 11 Most Shocking Things In The Power Broker.” It just crushes all nuance.
[Caro:] What you just told me, I’m thinking about when I was a reporter and they were reading something of mine, and if the engagement time or whatever was two seconds, I’d shoot myself!
He says that because he actually cares about what he writes! Because his hugely important books were designed to last, what I call “perennial sellers”—not get a short spike of attention and disappear. But sadly, the current system and the current tools with which to measure them don’t encourage that kind of thing.
Think about how we consume content online. It is not by subscription. The only viable subscription method for blogs, RSS, is long dead.
Just look at the top referring sources of traffic to major websites and blogs. Cumulatively, these referring sources almost always account for more visitors than the site’s direct traffic (i.e., people who typed in the URL). Though it varies from site to site, the biggest sources of traffic are, usually, in varying order: Google, Facebook, Twitter. The viewers were sent directly to a specific article for a disposable purpose: They’re not subscribers; they are seekers or glancers.
This is great news for a media manipulator, bad news for everyone else. The death of subscription means that instead of attempting to provide value to you, the longtime reader, blogs are constantly chasing Other Readers—the mythical reader out in viral land. Instead of providing quality day in and day out, writers chase big hits like a sexy scandal or a funny video meme. Bloggers aren’t interested in building up consistent, loyal readerships, whether it’s via paid subscription or even e-mail, because what they really need are the types of stories that will do hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews. They need stories that will sell.
There is this naive belief that readers have: If news is important, I’ll hear about it. I would argue the opposite—it’s mostly the least important news that will find you. It’s the extreme stuff that cuts through the noise. It’s the boring information, the secret stuff that people don’t want you to know, that you’ll miss. That’s the stuff you have to subscribe to, that you pay for, that you have to chase.
As a marketer, getting something “controversial” to blow up is easy, and it’s the tactic a media manipulator prefers to use over doing something “important.” With limited resources and the constraints of a tight medium, there are only a handful of options: sensationalism, extremism, sex, scandal, hatred. The media manipulator knows that bloggers know that these things sell—so that’s what we sell them.
Whereas subscriptions are about trust, single
-use traffic is all immediacy and impulse—even if the news has to be distorted to trigger it. Our news is what rises, and what rises is what spreads, and what spreads is what makes us angry or makes us laugh. Our media diet is quickly transformed into junk food, fake stories engineered by people like me to be consumed and passed around. It is the refined and processed sugars of the information food pyramid—out of the ordinary, unnatural, and deliberately sweetened.
Inside the chaos, it is easy to mislead. Only the exciting, sensational stuff finds readers—the stories that “blow up.” Reporters don’t have time for follow-ups or reasoned critiques, only quick hits. Blogs are all chasing the same types of stories, the mass media chase blogs, and the readers are following both of them—and everyone is led astray.
The reason paid subscription (and RSS) was abandoned was because in a subscription economy the users are in control. In the one-off model, the competition might be more vicious, but it is on the terms of the publisher. Having followers instead of subscribers—where readers have to check back on sites often and are barraged with a stream of refreshing content laden with ads—is much better for their bottom line.
When the blogger Andrew Sullivan switched his site to a subscription model a few years ago, his analysis of the situation was striking. He called subscription the “purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews . . . just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.”
Way too many outlets are led into temptation. It’s good for business and it’s fun.
BE THE NEWS YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD
Knowing all this, my strategy has always been: If I want to be written about, I do things they have to write about. When I advised a client to shoot the book he’d just written off into space, it wasn’t for scientific exploration—it was because doing something like that is so unusual, the media couldn’t resist writing about it. The same went for another author I worked with who held an atheist church service in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We tried to name the Planned Parenthood clinic after Tucker Max because we weren’t content to sit around and hope that people saw the book as controversial—we wanted to do something controversial. And all these stunts got considerable attention because the coverage was good for the outlets. They raked in all sorts of readers from it.
A few years ago, my company Brass Check got tired of dishonest marketers pretending to be able to create bestselling books that, in reality, were just Amazon.com category bestsellers—an easy feat when you can be “#1 New Releases in Freemasonry” for an hour. So we did a stunt where we illustrated just how easy it was to create these “bestsellers.” It took five minutes and three dollars, and we did indeed publish a fake book that hit number one—in the “Transpersonal Movements” category. But it was the fact that we actually did it that allowed for all the coverage. This wasn’t our opinion; it was proof. The post we wrote explaining the mechanics behind the stunt got over 500,000 views and the subsequent coverage got even more.*
A reporter from the Toronto Sun re-created the stunt herself just to see if it really was that easy. It was—and that meant more front-page coverage for us. Inquiries to our company shot through the roof.
The great Daniel Boorstin called these things pseudo-events. Why does a movie have a premiere? So the celebrities will show up and the media will cover it. Why does a politician hold a press conference? For the attention. A quick run down the list of pseudo-events shows their indispensability to the news business: press releases, award ceremonies, red-carpet events, product launches, anniversaries, grand openings, “leaks,” the contrite celebrity interview after a scandal, the sex tape, the tell-all, the public statement, controversial advertisements, marches on Washington, press junkets, and on and on.
These pseudo-events—put on for the sole purpose of generating headlines and media coverage—are real in the sense that they do exist, but they are fake in the sense that they are completely artificial. The event is not intended to accomplish anything itself but instead to introduce certain narratives into the media. If nobody covered them, it’d be like a tree falling in the woods. Pseudo-events are the media manipulator’s secret weapon.
Blog economics both depend on and indulge in pseudo-events even more than old media—they thrive on the artificiality. Because it’s planned, staged, and designed for coverage, pseudo-news is a kind of news subsidy. It is handed to blogs like a glass of water to a thirsty man. As deadlines get tighter and news staffs get smaller, fake events are exactly what bloggers need. More important, because they are clean, clear, and not constrained by the limits of what happens naturally, pseudo-events are typically much more interesting to publishers than real events.
If you do something newsworthy—that is, by today’s standards, something controversial, strange, weird, hilarious, or polarizing—you will be in the news. It’s that simple.
* Day invented the Help Wanted and Classifieds sections around this time. It was a highly effective way to drive daily sales.
*In other words, we’ve been tearing down public figures on bogus charges for more than a century. Do yourself a favor and look up the Fatty Arbuckle scandal for a sobering look at One-Off consequences.
*You can read it here: http://observer.com/2016/02/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes-to-be-a-bestselling-author-3-and-5-minutes/.
IX
TACTIC #6
MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE
A [Huffington Post] story . . . headlined: “Obama Rejects Rush Limbaugh Golf Match: Rush ‘Can Play With Himself.’ ” It’s digital nirvana: two highly searched proper nouns followed by a smutty entendre, a headline that both the red and the blue may be compelled to click, and the readers of the site can have a laugh while the headline delivers great visibility out on the web.
—DAVID CARR, NEW YORK TIMES
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 later 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.1
It worked. As a young man Upton Sinclair remembered hearing the newsboys shouting “Extra!” and seeing 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 rather a big difference between what he’d thought and what he’d bought. It was actually “War (may be) Declared (soon).”2
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 on our fancy MacBooks and wireless internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.
From today:*
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 are being yelled not on busy street corners but on noisy news aggregators and social networks.
Just like in the past, many online headlines exploit the so-called curiosity gap. If you don’t know what that is, this headline from FastCom pany.com satirizes it perfectly: “Upworthy’s Headlines Are Insufferable. Here’s Why You Click Anyway.” I’ve even done this with many of my own popular articles: “Here’s the Strategy Elite Athletes Follow to Perform at the Highest Level” (over 500,000 total views) or “The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings” (over one million views). You have to click to figure out what it means (and you can’t unclick once you have!).