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There’s nothing fun about being right if what you’re right about is the triumph, or the temporary triumph, of the inevitably bad.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something,” Upton Sinclair once said, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
It’s bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down. This isn’t anecdotal observation. It is fact. In a media monitoring study done by Cision and George Washington University, 89 percent of journalists reported using blogs for their research for stories. Roughly half reported using Twitter to find and research stories, and more than two thirds used other social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in the same way.
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.
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.
You’re free to view these lessons as opportunities or as loopholes that must be closed. I see them as both.
Advertisement × Traffic = Revenue.
Traffic is money.
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.
This is a critical difference. Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.
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
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press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely.
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,
This is something I have to explain to clients in crisis PR situations all the time. I say, “Look, if your response isn’t more interesting than the allegations, no one is going to care. You might as well not bother.”
No smart marketer is ever going to push a story with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions. We want to rile people up. We want to provoke you into talking.
The problem is that facts are rarely clearly good or bad. They just are. The truth is often boring and complicated.
It’s almost as if the insatiable media appetite for stories that will make people angry and outraged has created a market for anger and outrage. It’s almost as if that’s why we’re so divided and upset. Oh wait, that is why!
A click is a click and a pageview is a pageview. A blogger doesn’t care how they get it. Their bosses don’t care. They just want it.* The headline is there to get you to view the article, end of story.
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.
Although it seems easy, headline writing is an incredibly difficult task. The editor has to reduce an entire story down to just a few units of text—turning a few hundred- or thousand-word piece into just a few words, period. In the process it must express the article’s central ideas in an exciting way.
many online headlines exploit the so-called curiosity gap. If you don’t know what that is, this headline from FastCompany.com satirizes it perfectly: “Upworthy’s Headlines Are Insufferable. Here’s Why You Click Anyway.” I’ve even done this with many of my own popular articles: “Here’s the Strategy Elite Athletes Follow to Perform at the Highest Level” (over 500,000 total views) or “The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings” (over one million views). You have to click to figure out what it means
A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us. —NEIL STRAUSS,
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 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 sound bites. But it isn’t, so conflict, talking heads, and
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the media doesn’t mind being played, because they get something out of it—namely, pageviews, ratings, and readers.
the best way to make your critics work for you is to make them irrationally angry.
This is what opponents of the alt-right seem to miss. They are trying to make you upset. They want you to be irrationally angry—it’s how they win. Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity, because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility.
The only way to beat them is by controlling your reaction and letting them embarrass themselves, as they inevitably will.
Their subtle felonies against the truth are deliberate and premeditated. The way to beat them is not by freaking out. It’s by beating them at their own game. And sooner is better—because every day we wait there is more collateral damage.
The idea that the web is empowering is just a bunch of rattling, chattering talk. Everything you consume online has been “optimized” to make you dependent on it. Content is engineered to be clicked, glanced at, or found—like a trap designed to bait, distract, and capture you.
The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance. . . . He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed.
“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,”
They don’t want silence. No wonder blogs auto-refresh with new material every thirty seconds. Of course they want to send updates to your phone and include you on e-mail alerts. No one is listening to you—they’re laughing at you. They’re glad you’re distracted. They’re happy you’re posting on social media, because it means you’re not showing up at city council meetings, because it means you’re not voting.
Twitter isn’t designed to help you get in and get out with the best information as quickly as possible—it’s supposed to suck you into either a contentious world of argument and debate or an echo chamber that reassures you everyone thinks like you do. Facebook is supposedly one of the largest news sources in the world, and days after the election, it denied that the news it shared could have possibly impacted users’ behavior in a significant way.
If the users stop for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the business model would fall apart.
It’s time we all came to terms with our compulsion: How is anyone going to make America or themselves great again, if we’re all glued to our devices and television screens? How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?
I deleted Twitter from my phone. I deleted Facebook from my phone. I deleted the Google News app from my phone. I figured out how to remove Apple News from Siri. I removed CNN from my nightly scan of the television channels. I wasn’t interested in being jerked around anymore. I didn’t need to follow every meaningless update or fall for every outrageous headline. It was preventing me from seeing the bigger pictures. Now, if only politicians and leaders could do the same. The world would be a better place.
