Franklin Foer’s autobiographical article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic presents a fascinating case study of how the “attention economy” created by the monetization of the Internet distorted the journalistic output of a once-storied American political journal. Foer’s misadventures as editor of The New Republic are just one example of the familiar story of how the migration of content to the Internet damaged the revenue mechanisms of traditional newspapers and periodicals. Nevertheless, the specific details in Foer’s tale are compelling and instructive.
As most non-millennials likely recall, magazines such as TNR were once almost exclusively sold as complete issues (released on a weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly basis) containing several articles by various contributors. Readers bought them through a subscription or at the newsstand.
The journalism industry has faced a fundamental dilemma after most content moved onto the Internet. There are two major ways to create revenue on the web: through subscribers to your site, or through advertising. Some major newspapers have tried to gain subscribers through limiting access via various versions of the paywall, and many of them now seem to be finding more success with that model by allowing everyone temporary access to a limited number of free articles before blocking further access to non-subscribers.
But most online periodicals solely gain revenue from advertising that appears on the web pages themselves. This makes getting a large number of clicks on various stories absolutely essential to these publications. The result has been an increase in “clickbait” and sensational headlines over the past few years. Most web news consumers know that this problem has been particularly acute on more gossipy sites such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post. But the interesting aspect of Foer’s story is that it reveals the tension that exists when a higher-end publication such as The New Republic, which has traditionally valued certain non-commercial intellectual ideals more highly than the absolute maximization of revenue, is exposed to the Internet commercial environment. TNR based its entire identity in being substantive rather than tabloidy, and yet it changed after its exposure to the commercial pressures of the modern online news marketplace.
Until reading the Foer piece, I was not aware of applications like Chartbeat, that baldly expose what content is getting clicks, and what articles are not being viewed. This data, in an ideal world, would not be interpreted as the sole factor determining each story’s (and each journalist’s) worth in contributing value to the publication and its readers. However, under the ugly financial pressures of the current online world, where every item’s audience size is exposed to the skeptical scrutiny of advertisers, page views probably are all too often seen to be the only metric that truly matters.
Foer is also insightful in noting that the issue-based model of publishing allowed editors to sneak in important “eat your vegetables” type stories, which are unsexy but important, into an issue that mostly sells based upon a jazzy cover story. As Foer puts it, “Thinking about bundling articles into something larger was intellectually liberating. Editors justified high-minded and quixotic articles as essential for ‘the mix.’ If readers didn’t want a report on child poverty or a dispatch from South Sudan, they wouldn’t judge you for providing one. In fact, they might be flattered that you thought they would like to read such articles.”
Now, in an article-based and click-based world, a story that cannot generate a large amount of attention on its own merits cannot justify its existence. Of course, the final, brutal reality in the model of journalism as a battle for reader attention is the rise of “fake news” (not discussed in detail by Foer). The temptation in this scorched-earth battle for clicks is to concoct exciting falsehoods that generate even more attention than even the most shocking and sensational factual stories.
Unless a more subscription-based, issue-based model of journalism is revived, and unless there is more policing of factually questionable content by gatekeepers such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, this nation’s citizenry seems likely become more and more poorly informed.