More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
I think of blogs as today’s newswires.
By “blog,” I’m referring collectively to all online publishing.
A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers.
Radio DJs and news anchors once filled their broadcasts with newspaper headlines; today they repeat what they read on blogs—certain blogs more than others.
blogs are vehicles from which mass media reporters—and your most chatty and “informed” friends—discover and borrow the news.
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?
Learn their rules, change the game. That’s all it takes to control public opinion.
Blogs need things to cover.
blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space. The site that covers the most stuff wins.
change reality through the coverage.
the person they arbitrarily decided to cover was turned into an actual candidate.
Pawlenty’s campaign for elected office may have failed, but for blogs and other media, it was profitable success.
The constraints of blogging create artificial content, which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events.
The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth.
Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen.
powerful political interests that could not allow Cain to become anything more than a sideshow. So his narrative was changed,
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.
these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the [I]nternet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones.
this pattern inherently distorts and exaggerates whatever they cover.
It’s bloggers informing bloggers informing bloggers all the way down.
The more immediate the nature of their publishing mediums (blogs, then newspapers, then magazines), the more heavily a journalist will depend on sketchy online sources,
small blogs
are some of the easiest sites to get traction on.
What’s important is that the site is small and understaffed. This makes it possible to sell them a story that is only loosely connected to their core message
The blogs of newspapers and local television stations are some of the best targets.
“Mass Media Sections That Update More Often but with Less Editorial Oversight.”
the bloggers at Forbes.com or the Chicago Tribune do not operate on the same editorial guidelines as their print counterparts.
These sites won’t write about just anything, though,
National
less direct pushing and a lot more massaging.
Mass media reporters monitor aggregators for story ideas, and often cover what is trending there,
make sure that such reporters notice the story’s gaining traction.
they tend to get their story ideas from the same second-level sites,
craft the story for those sites and automatically set yourself up to appeal to the other reporters reading it
It’s a simple illusion: Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it. They rarely bother to look past the first impressions.
In creating outrage for the movie, I had a lot of luck getting local websites to cover or spread the news about protests of the screenings we had organized through anonymous tips.
Three or four links are the makings of a trend piece, or even a controversy—that’s all major outlets and national website need to see to get excited.
The key to getting from the second to the third level is the soft sell.
Reporters rarely get substantial tips or alerts from their readers, so to get two or even three legitimate tips about an issue is a strong signal.
By the end of this charade, hundreds of reputable reporters, producers, and bloggers had been swept up into participating.
Once you get a story like this started it takes on a life of its own.
The media, like any group of animals, gallops in a herd. It takes just one steer to start a stampede.
Every person (with the exception of a few at the top layer) in this ecosystem is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest of deadlines. Yes, you have something to sell. But more than ever they desperately, desperately need to buy. The flimsiest of excuses is all it takes.
misinformation can spread even when no one is consciously pushing or manipulating it.
Not only is the web susceptible to spreading false information, but it can also be the source of it.
the same weakness creates the opportunity for dangerous, even deadly, abuses of the system.
THE ECONOMICS OF ONLINE NEWS—the way blogging really works—is a shocking thing.
as businesses designed to make money, the way in which they do business is the main filter for how they do the news. Every story they produce must contort itself to fit this mold—whatever the topic or subject.
Advertisement × Traffic=Revenue.
Traffic is money.
