Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

by Ryan Holiday

  Yet the media and the public, aware of the potential implications of airing video of his act, began to push back. Many decided they would not air such a video. Some five hundred people attended a protest in Kabul where they burned Jones in effigy. At the last second Jones, under pressure, backed down, and the crisis was averted.

  But Terry Jones was back a few months later, announcing for the second time that he planned to burn the Koran. Each blog and outlet that covered the lead-up to the burning made the story—and the media monster that was Terry Jones—that much bolder and bigger. Reporters asked if a direct request from President Obama would stop him, which of course meant that the president of the United States of America would have to negotiate with a homegrown terrorist (he traded up the chain to the most powerful man in the world).

  This circus was what finally pushed Jones over the edge. In March 2011, he went through with the burning, despite the threatened media blackout.

  He called their bluff and it worked. The blackout fell apart when a college student named Andrew Ford, freelancing for the wire service Agence France-Presse, took advantage of a story too dirty and dangerous for many journalists to touch in good conscience.*

  Agence France-Presse, Ford’s publisher, is syndicated on Google and Yahoo! News. They immediately republished his article. The story began to go up the chain, getting bigger and bigger. Roughly thirty larger blogs and online news services had picked up Ford’s piece or linked to it in the first day. It made the story too big for the rest of the media—including the foreign press—to continue to resist. So the news of Jones’s Koran burning, a calculated stunt to extract attention from a system that could not prevent itself from being exploited, became known to the world. And it was a deadly monster of a story.

  Within days, twenty-seven people were killed during riots in Afghanistan, including seven UN workers; forty more were injured. Christians were specifically targeted, and Taliban flags were flown in the streets of the Kabul. “It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move a story halfway around the globe within twenty-four hours,” the Poynter Institute wrote in an analysis of the reporting. This was, as Forbes journalist Jeff Bercovici put it, truly an example of “when Journalism 2.0 kills.”8

  One kook, one overeager young journalist, unintentionally show why trading up the chain—feeding the monster—can be so dangerous (though for Jones, very effective). They weren’t just turning nothing into something. The beast these blogs built up was set off needless bloodshed.

  You can trade up the chain for charity or you can trade up it to create funny fake news—or you can do it to create violence, hatred, and even incidentally, death. I’ve done the first two, while others, out of negligence or malice, have done the latter. At the end of the day, intentions are not a justification I’m going to hide behind. There is more than enough blame to go around.

  * Proving this theory unnervingly correct, Newsweek picked up the Lindsay’s advice from her tiny personal blog and reposted it on the the official Newsweek Tumblr.

  * It is standard practice in journalism that the identity of anonymous sources must be shared with the editor so that they know the person is real and the writer hasn’t been tricked. I have been used as an anonymous source for blogs dozens of times. No one has ever asked my identity, I’ve never been verified, and I have never spoken to an editor.

  * In fact, a few years later one of the sites we exploited repeatedly while promoting the movie wrote a post titled: “Are traditional news media stealing scoops from bloggers?,” which accused the Chicago Tribune of stealing article ideas from her blog Chicago Now. She was right, they were stealing, and that’s exactly how we got coverage into the editorial page of the Tribune.

  * This was excellently caught and detailed by Quickish in its post “‘Brett Farve on Dancing With the Stars?’ No. Not Even a Rumor”; their research was promptly stolen and reposted by the oft-guilty Deadspin for an easy twenty-five thousand pageviews.

  * This happens in politics all the time, as Democratic consultant Christian Grantham told Forbes, “Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs.” (Daniel Lyons, “Attack of the Blogs,” last modified November 14, 2005, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/1114/128_3.html).

  III

  THE BLOG CON

  HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE

  STRIPPED BARE, THE ECONOMICS OF ONLINE NEWS—the way blogging really works—is a shocking thing. I’ve never been desperate enough to need to work inside the system as a lowly (un-) paid blogger, but as an outsider (a press agent and a media buyer), I saw plenty. What I learned is the ways that sites such as AOL, the Huffington Post, and even the website of the New York Times make their money, and how much money they actually make.

  This matters, because as businesses designed to make money, the way in which they do business is the main filter for how they do the news. Every story they produce must contort itself to fit this mold—whatever the topic or subject. I will show you this by explaining exactly how I have exploited these economics for my own personal gain. You’re free to view these lessons as opportunities or as loopholes that must be closed. I see them as both.

  TRAFFIC IS MONEY

  On the face of it, blogs make their money from selling advertisements. These advertisements are paid for by the impression (generally a rate per thousand impressions). A site might have several ad units on each page; the publisher’s revenue equals the cumulative CPM (cost per thousand) multiplied by the number of pageviews. Advertisement × Traffic = Revenue. An ad buyer like me buys this space by the millions—ten million impressions on this site, five million on another, fifty million through a network. A few blogs produce a portion of their revenue through selling extras—hosting conferences or affiliate deals—but, for the most part, this is the business: Traffic is money.

  A portion of the advertising on blogs is sold directly by the publisher, a portion is sold by sales reps who work on commission, and the rest is sold by advertising networks that specialize in the remaining inventory. Regardless of who sells it or who buys it, what matters is that every ad impression on a site is monetized, if only for a few pennies. Each and every pageview is money in the pocket of the publisher.

  Publishers and advertisers can’t differentiate between the types of impressions an ad does on a site. A perusing reader is no better than an accidental reader. An article that provides worthwhile advice is no more valuable than one instantly forgotten. So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click.

  Knowing this, blogs do everything they can to increase the latter variable in the equation (traffic, pageviews). It’s how you must understand them as a business. Every decision a publisher makes is ruled by one dictum: traffic by any means.

  Scoops Are Traffic

  One of the biggest shocks to the online world was the launch of TMZ. The blog was developed by AOL in 2005, and revenues skyrocketed to nearly $20 million a year almost immediately, paving the way for its now famous television program. This was all accomplished through a handful of major scoops. Or at least, TMZ’s special definition of “scoops.”

  The blog’s founder, Harvey Levin, once said in an interview that TMZ is “a serious news operation that has the same rigid standards that any news operation in America has.” This is the same site that once published, at 4:07 A.M., an exclusive scoop: a blurry, never-before-seen photo of future president John F. Kennedy on a boat filled with naked women. This EXCLUSIVE scoop was headlined “The JFK Photo That Could Have Changed History.” Only it couldn’t have altered world events for one simple reason: The man in the photo wasn’t JFK. In fact, it turned out to be a spread from a 1967 issue of Playboy.1 Oops!

  Despite missteps like this, TMZ turned scoop-getting into a science. They broke the story of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic outbursts during his DUI arrest. And then got video of Michael Richards’s racist o
nstage meltdown, posted the bruised Rihanna police photo, and announced the news of Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ originated four of the biggest stories to come from the Internet and captured a substantial audience from these enormous surges of traffic.* They didn’t always use the most reputable or reliable means off getting their scoops, but nevertheless, today when people think celebrity news, they think of TMZ. (They don’t think of Defamer, Gawker’s predecessor to TMZ, which was shuttered because it couldn’t deliver any scoops and they don’t like Perez Hilton’s silly little drawings anymore either.)

  It sent a very clear message to publishers: Exclusives build blogs. Scoops equal traffic.

  The thing is, exclusive scoops are rare, and at the very least, they require some effort to obtain. So greedy blogs have perfected what is called the “pseudo-exclusive.” In a private memo to his employees, Nick Denton, founder and publisher of the Gawker Media blog empire, asked the writers to use this technique, because it allows them “to take ownership of a story even if it isn’t a strict exclusive.”2 In other words, pretend they have a scoop. The strategy works well, because many readers will see the story in only one place; they have no idea that it was actually broken or originally reported elsewhere.

  One of Gawker’s biggest scoops early on in the race—certainly a TMZ-level story—was a collection of Tom Cruise Scientology videos. It is a good example of a pseudo-exclusive, since the work wasn’t done by the site who eventually got all the pageviews from it. Since I witnessed the story unfold behind the scenes, I know that tapes were actually unearthed by Hollywood journalist Mark Ebner, whose blog I was advising at the time. Ebner called me, very excited with news of a potentially huge scoop and said that he’d bring over the materials. A few hours later, he gave me some DVDs in an envelope marked confidential, which I watched later that night with a friend. Our stupid reaction: “Tom Cruise being crazy; how is that new?”

  Gawker had a different reaction. See, Ebner had also shown the clips to his friends at Gawker, who turned around and immediately posted a story featuring the videos before Mark or anyone else had a chance to. I don’t know whether Gawker promised Mark they’d give him credit. All I know is that what happened was shitty: Their post went on to do 3.2 million views and bring their site a whole new audience. Mark received nothing, because Gawker didn’t link back to his site—which would have been the right thing to do. By doing this, Gawker owned a story that was not theirs. Only after did I begin to understand how blog fortunes were made: off the backs of others.

  When all it takes is one story to propel a blog from the dredges of the Internet to mainstream notoriety, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sites will do anything to get their shot, even if it means manufacturing or stealing scoops (and deceiving readers and advertisers in the process).

  Established media doesn’t have this problem. They aren’t anxious for name recognition, because they already have it. Instead of bending the rules (and the truth) to get it, their main concern for their business model is to protect their reputations. This is a critical difference. Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.

  Using Names to Build a Name

  Blogs are built on scoops and traffic, and this is made possible by big names. The economics of the Internet values consistent hitters, and so one of the safest bets a site can make is to lock up an all-star or A-list blogger to helm their business. Like so much of the history of blogging, this trend begins with Gawker…sort of.

  In 2004, Jason Calacanis, the found of Weblogs, Inc., poached editor Pete Rojas away from Gizmodo, at the time the dominant gadget blog owned by Gawker. He gave Rojas a small equity stake in his company, and together they founded Engadget, which quickly surpassed Gizmodo as the reigning champion of scoops and big stories. After founding Engadget, Rojas created another site for Calacanis, this time a video game blog called Joystiq, which became another enormously popular site.

  Next, there is Andrew Sullivan, who makes Rojas look like a minor league player. Sullivan’s name and blog, The Dish, is one of the most sought-after to build a site around. His now decade-old site was first leased by Time magazine’s website and spent several years under their domain. He was then stolen away from Time.com by TheAtlantic.com to bring digital life to the faltering print publication. Sullivan delivered; his Daily Dish would eventually draw more than one million visitors a month to The Atlantic. Like any franchise athlete, they were able to build a team around him, using his name to attract writers and influential readers. In 2011, Sullivan left for The Daily Beast, in order to start the cycle all over again—but the bump in traffic and prestige stayed at The Atlantic. The Daily Beast, fresh from its merger with Newsweek, was equally desperate for traffic and name recognition and was willing to pay serious money for a shot of Sullivan’s brand-building power.

  Bringing in big (online) names is now a go-to move for sites trying to build traffic. The New York Times brought the Freakonomics blog under their umbrella in 2007, and later did the same with Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com. B5Media launched Crushable.com and TheGloss.com under the charge of notorious Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers. The Huffington Post built most of its original cache by having celebrities blog on the site, a rarer feat then than it is now. The list goes on and on.

  All these bloggers, from Sullivan to Rojas to Spiers, got their high-paying gigs (and often a percentage of a site’s revenue) because they built big names for themselves. Their strategy is the same as their publisher’s: Build a brand by courting controversy, breaking big scoops, driving comments, and publishing constantly. And their big deals with sites like the New York Times or The Daily Beast make these questionable tactics all the more necessary. The big names have to stay big to stay on top.

  THE BLOG CON: NAMES, SCOOPS, AND TRAFFIC CREATE AN EXIT

  I’ve written about how sites engage in an endless chase for revenue through pageviews, and that is what they do. However, blogs are not intended to be profitable and independent businesses. The tools they use to build traffic and revenue are part of a larger play.

  Blogs are built to be sold. Though they make substantial revenues from advertising, the real money is in selling the entire site to a larger company for a multiple of the traffic and earnings. Usually to a rich sucker.

  Weblogs, Inc. was sold to AOL for $25 million. The Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million in cash, with its owner, Arianna Huffington, deliberately eschewing the opportunity to wait and build for an IPO. TechCrunch was also sold to AOL for $30 million. Discovery bought the blog TreeHugger for $10 million. Ars Technica was sold to Condé Nast for more than $20 million. Know Your Meme was acquired by Cheezburger Media for seven figures. FOX Sports Interactive purchased the sports blog network Yardbarker. I worked on an acquisition like this myself when The Collective, a talent management company I advise, bought Bloody Disgusting, a blog about horror films, with an eye on potentially selling it to someone bigger down the line.

  Blogs are built and run with an exit in mind. This is really why they need scoops and acquire marquee bloggers—to build up their names for investors and to show a trend of rapidly increasing traffic. The pressure for this traffic in a short period of time is intense. And desperation, as a media manipulator knows, is the greatest quality you can hope for in a potential victim. Each blog is its own mini-Ponzi scheme, for which traffic growth is more important than solid financials, brand recognition more important than trust, and scale more important than business sense. Blogs are built so someone else will want it—one stupid buyer cashing out the previous ones—and millions of dollars are exchanged for essentially worthless assets.

  ANYTHING GOES IN THE DEN OF THIEVES

  It doesn’t surprise me at all that shady business deals and conflicts of interest abound in this world. My favorite example, of course, is myself. I am regularly the online ad buyer and the publicist or PR contact for the clients I represent. So the same sites that snarkily cover my companies also depend on me for
large six- or even seven-figure checks each year. On the same day a writer for a blog might be e-mailing me for information about a rumor they heard, their publisher is calling me on the phone asking if I want to increase the size of my ad buy. Later in this book I’ll write about how difficult it is to get bloggers to correct even blatantly inaccurate stories—this conflict of interest was one of the only effective tools I could use to combat that. Naturally, nobody minded what I was doing, because they were too busy lining their own pockets to care.

  Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.

  When criticized for these conflicts he responded by saying that his competitors were simply jealous because he was—I’m not kidding—“a lot better than them.” So when Arrington blew the lid off a secret meeting of angel investors in Silicon Valley in 2011—later known as “Angelgate”—it’s hard to say whose interests he was serving, his readers’ or his own. Or maybe he was upset not because collusion is wrong but because the group had declined to invite him and—again, not kidding—treated him rudely when he showed up anyway. He ultimately left TechCrunch after a highly publicized fight with the new owners, AOL, who dared to question this conflict of interest.