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

by Ryan Holiday

The reason the knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.

Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo explaining the company’s position, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a “memo we just got from our boss.” The same bloggers who were uninterested in the facts when I informed them directly gladly put up EXCLUSIVE! and LEAKED! posts about it. They could tell my side of the story because I told it to them in words they wanted to hear. More people saw it than ever would have had I issued an “official statement.”

HARO essentially encourages journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say,

Study the top stories at Digg or MSN.com and you’ll notice a pattern: the top stories all polarize people. If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs—behavior, belief, or belongings—you get a huge virus-like dispersion. —TIM FERRISS, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos.

A powerful predictor of whether content

will spread online is valence, or the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel.

As Brian Moylan, a former Gawker writer, once bragged, the key is to “get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.”

have my own analysis: When you take away the question mark, it usually turns their headline into a lie. The reason bloggers like to use it is because it lets them get away with a false statement that no one can criticize.

This is exactly the same position blogs are in today. Just as blogs are fine with manipulators easing their burden, so too were the yellow papers.

Media historian W. J. Campbell once identified the distinguishing markers of yellow journalism as follows: Prominent headlines that screamed excitement about ultimately unimportant news Lavish use of pictures (often of little relevance) Impostors, frauds, and faked interviews Color comics and a big, thick Sunday supplement Ostentatious support for the underdog causes

Use of anonymous sources Prominent coverage of high society and events

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

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.