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Members of the media like to talk about the essential role it plays in society and in democracy. They’re right. And they haven’t been doing their jobs. In fact, they are just as much a part of the problem as manipulators and marketers are—perhaps even more so.
when it came out, the book was controversial, on purpose. I knew that to cut through the noise, everything about it had to be different and prove the ideas in the book. I won’t say I was an angel about it—but I definitely made my point. I leaked that the book was a celebrity tell-all, which blogs picked up without verifying. I doubled the size of my advance in the announcement and nobody fact-checked it. I got popular media folks to denounce the book and used their outrage to sell more copies.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago. (Thanks
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that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” the headline read.
Like many people, I remained a believer. I thought the web was a meritocracy, and that the good stuff generally rose to the top. But spending serious time in the media underworld, watching as the same outlets who fell for easy marketing stunts seriously report on matters of policy or culture will disabuse you of that naïveté. It will turn that hope into cynicism.
In books decades out of print I saw criticism of media loopholes that had now reopened.
An obscure item I found in the course of my research has always stayed with me. It was a mention of a 1913 editorial cartoon published in the long since defunct Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper. The cartoon, it
said, showed a businessman throwing coins into the mouth of a giant fang-bared monster of many arms, which stood menacingly in front of him. Each of its tentacle-like arms, which were destroying the city around it, was tattooed with the words like: “Cultivating Hate,” “Distorting Facts,” and “Slush to Inflame.” The man was an advertiser and the mouth belonged to the malicious yellow press that needed his money to survive. Underneath was a caption: THE FOOL WHO FEEDS THE MONSTER.
A good question about the ethics of a certain profession or activity is: What would the world look like if more people behaved like you? In my case, the answer was: “A lot worse.”
We live in a world of many hustlers, and you are the mark. The con is to build a brand off the backs of others. Your attention and your credulity are being stolen.
The man clearly sensed something that most politicians hadn’t yet realized: that the culture of Twitter, the economics of online content, had swallowed everything else in the world.
think of blogs and social media as today’s newswires.
By “blog” I’m referring collectively to all online publishing. That’s everything from Twitter accounts to major newspaper websites to web videos to group blogs with hundreds of writers. I don’t care whether the owners consider themselves blogs or not. The reality is that they are all subject to the same incentives, and they fight for attention with similar tactics.*
What begins online ends offline.
Gawker Media, Business Insider, Breitbart, Politico, Vox, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Huffington Post, Medium, Drudge Report, and the like. This is not because they are the most widely read, but instead because they are mostly read by the media elite. Not
If something is being chatted about on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, it will make its way through all other forms of media and eventually into culture itself. That’s a fact.
One early media critic put it this way: We’re a country governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the press, so isn’t it critical to understand what governs the press? What rules over the media, he concluded, rules over the country. In
blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins.
Political blogs know that their traffic goes up during election cycles. Since traffic is what they sell to advertisers, elections equal increased revenue.
Political blogs need things to cover; traffic increases during election Reality (election far away) does not align with this Political blogs create candidates early, gravitating toward the absurd and controversial; election cycle starts earlier The person they cover, by virtue of coverage, becomes actual candidate (or president) Blogs profit (literally); the public loses
Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen. This is just one facet of the economics of blogging, but it’s a critical one. When we understand the logic that drives these business choices, those choices become predictable. And what is predictable can be anticipated, redirected, accelerated, or controlled—however you or I choose.
Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and
more quantity. And it works to my advantage most of the time, because I think most reporters have liked me packaging things for them. Most people will opt for what’s easier, so they can move on to the next thing. Reporters are measured by how often their stuff gets on Drudge. It’s a bad way to be, but it’s reality. —KURT BARDELLA, FORMER PRESS SECRETARY FOR REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN DARRELL ISSA
“trading up the chain.” It’s a strategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with a small blog that has very low standards, which then becomes the source for a story by a larger blog, and that, in turn, for a story by larger media outlets. I create, to use the words of one media scholar, a “self-reinforcing news wave.”
Following the strategy I helped lay out, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.)
Ethical to spotlight a story that’s a better story, even if not common? Even if not the best representative of the organizations mission?
Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on
In anticipation of all of this, he’d been active on a channel of the social
news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to b...
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This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like Boing Boing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit.
There are thousands of content creators scouring the web looking for things to write about. They must write several times each day. This is no easy task, so bloggers search Twitter, Facebook, comments sections, press releases, rival blogs, and other sources to develop their material.
Above them are hundreds of midlevel online and offline journalists at websites and blogs and in magazines and newspapers who
use those bloggers below them as sources and filters. They also have to write constantly—and engage in the same search for buzz, only a little more developed.
Above them are the major national websites, publications, and television stations. They in turn browse the scourers below them for their material, grabbing their leads and turning them into truly national conversations.
Finally, between, above, and throughout these concentric levels is the largest group: us, the audience. We scan the web for material that we can watch, comment on, or share with our friends and followers.
the first level, small blogs and local websites that cover your neighborhood or scene are some of the easiest sites to get traction on. Since they typically write about local, personal issues pertaining to a contained readership, trust is very high. At the same time, they are cash-strapped and traffic-hungry, always on the lookout for a big story that might draw a big spike of new viewers. It
The blogs of newspapers and local television stations are some of the best targets. For starters, they share the same URL and often get aggregated in Google News. Places like the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and CBS often have sister sites that feature the companies’ logos but have their own editorial standards, not always as rigorous as their old media counterparts’.
you can now leverage this coverage to access the highest level of media: the national press. Getting to this level usually involves less direct pushing and a lot more massaging. The sites that have already taken your bait are now on your side. They desperately want their articles to get as much traffic as possible, and being linked to or mentioned on national sites is how they do that.
You just want to make sure that such reporters notice the story’s gaining traction. Take the outlet where you’d ultimately like to receive coverage and observe it for patterns. You’ll notice that they tend to get their story ideas from the same second-level sites, and by tailoring the story to those smaller sites (or site), it sets you up to be noticed by the larger one.
Three or four links are the makings of a trend piece, or even a controversy—that’s all major outlets and national websites need to see to get excited.
People like getting pissed off almost as much as they like actual porn.
Trading up the chain relies on an insight from crisis public relations expert Michael Sitrick. When attempting to turn things around for a particularly disliked or controversial client, Sitrick was fond of saying, “We need to find a lead steer!” The media, like any group of animals, gallops in a herd. It takes just one steer to start a stampede. The first level is your lead steer. The rest is just pointing everyone’s attention to the direction it went in.
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
Established press 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.
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.
I don’t necessarily think that contributor programs are all bad—I’ve helped several major publications build them out—but I do think the public needs to be more informed about the difference between these styles of content. You might think you’re reading an article written by a professional journalist when, in reality, you are reading something written by someone who is paid so little for what they wrote that they can be a target for real bribes from the subject of their story (as has happened at contributor-heavy online publications like Forbes.com). Here’s an e-mail I just got, offering
Ryan, I’ve been following your writing on Entrepreneur for some time now, I hope you don’t mind me dropping you a quick email. My name is Gareth, I am a London based, Digital PR Consultant. I work with credible clients offering them a ‘media mention’ service on the publications you write for. We work with our clients to create natural informative content (e.g. blog posts, infographics)
that would be of value to your upcoming articles in order to place them with a link back to their site. We can also provide interesting and relevant quotes from the CEO or senior employees at our partners business to add value to your articles. Please remember, We only offer you links that add value to your articles, and we pay promptly for each link that is placed. Just reply to this email and I’d be happy to discuss the remuneration involved and get you started, Thanks and
The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company. They can build a name and sell it to a sucker, just like their owners and investors are trying to do. Once a blogger builds a personal brand—through scoops or controversy or major stories—they can expect a cushy job at a magazine or start-up desperate for the credibility and buzz that these attributes offer. These lagging companies can then tell shareholders, “See, we’re current!” or “We’re turning things around!”
Nolan is being paid by how many views his posts do. His financial interest isn’t in what he writes about but in how he writes. In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest.
