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

by Ryan Holiday

  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

  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 wel
l 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? ryan.holiday@gmail.com.”

  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.

  As Drew Curtis of Fark.com says, “Problems occur when the journalist has to find an angle on a story that doesn’t have one.” It’s not a new criticism, as the Washington Post wrote in 1899:

  The New York Times has such abnormal keenness of vision that it is occasionally able to see that which does not exist. The ardency of its desire sometimes overcomes the coolness of its reasons, so that the thing it wants to see shows up just where it wants it to be, but in so intangible a form that no other eye is able to detect, no other mind finds ground to suspect its presence.1

  The difference between the New York Times and blogs a century later is that the New York Times was dealing with at least somewhat worthy material. Bloggers latch onto the most tenuous wisps of news on places like Facebook or Twitter and then apply their “abnormal keenness” to seeing what is not there. A writer for the Mediabistro blog 10,000 Words once advised new bloggers that they could find good material by scanning community bulletin boards on craigslist for “what people are complaining about these days.”2 I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t qualify as representative news. Considering that anyone can post anything on craigslist, this gives me a pretty good idea of how to create some fake local new
s. If they don’t mind seeing what isn’t there, I’m happy to help.

  Angle-hunters sometimes come up empty. In a perfect world, writers should be able to explore a story lead, find it leads nowhere, and abandon it. But that luxury is not available online. As the veteran bloggers John Biggs and Charlie White put it in their book Blogger Boot Camp, there is “no topic too mundane that you can’t pull a post out of it.”

  This is their logic. As a marketer, it’s easy to fall in love with it.

  Blogs will publish anything if you manufacture urgency around it. Give a blogger an illusionary twenty-minute head start over other media sources, and they’ll write whatever you want, however you want it. Publicists love to promise blogs the exclusive on an announcement. The plural there is not an accident. You can give the same made-up exclusive to multiple blogs, and they’ll all fall over themselves to publish first. Throw in an arbitrary deadline, like “We’re going live with this on our website first thing in the morning,” and even the biggest blogs will forget fact-checking and make bold pronouncements on your behalf.

  Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook onto false pretenses, analyze a false subject, and inform falsely.

  When I say it’s okay for you to make stuff up because everybody else is doing it, I’m not kidding. MG Siegler is, and he’s one of the dominant voices in tech blogging (TechCrunch, PandoDaily). According to him, most of what he and his competitors write is bullshit. “I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it, like 80%,” he once admitted, “but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.”3 I’d commend him for coming clean, but this uncharacteristic moment of self-awareness in 2012 hasn’t seemed to have changed his blogging habits.