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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Read between
August 26 - October 1, 2019
This is an unproductive attitude. It forgets the structure and constraints of blogging as a medium and how these realities explain almost everything blogs do.
The way news is found online more or less determines what is found.
The medium is the message.
the superficiality of cable news
TV is a visual medium,
so conflict, talking heads, and b-roll footage are all you’ll get.
Blogs aren’t any different. The way the medium works essentially predetermines what bloggers can publish
Why do blogs constantly chase new stories? Why do they update so much? Why are posts so short? A look at their development makes it clear: Bloggers don’t have a choice.
How do our readers know what’s new?
New stuff goes at the top.
“Rule #1” is “Always Be Blogging,”
creating a newsworthy event out of nothing becomes a daily occurrence.
why would a blogger spend much time on a post that will very shortly be pushed below view?
The best way to get traffic is to publish as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and as simply as possible.
see the end of your post coming around eight hundred words in,
Even eight hundred words is pushing it,
break it up with graphics or photos, and definitely some links.
the ideal Gawker item.
“one hundred words long. Two hundred, max.
Preposterously faulty intuition
The pressure to keep content visually appealing and ready for impulse readers is a constant suppressant on length,
the site has one second to make the hook. One second. The bounce rate on blogs, or the percentage of people who leave the site immediately, without clicking anything, is incredibly high.
this dynamic is going to seriously impact content choices.
The biggest draw of eyeballs is the headline,
glance tends to descend downward along the left hand column,
small, short paragraphs
a bolded introduction or subheadline (occasionally called a deck).
Forty percent of every article must be cut.
When Nielsen talks about cutting 40 percent of an article, actually knowing anything about what they’re talking about is what bloggers leave on the cutting-room floor.
to eight hundred or fewer word posts about stories they know will generate traffic.
Only a fool addicted to his laptop would fail to see that the material demanded by the constraints of their medium and the one reality gives them rarely match. On the other hand, I quite like these fools.
once you understand the limitations of the platform, the constraints can be used against the people who depend on it. The technology can be turned on itself.
To get attention we had to cut it up into itty-bitty bites and spoon-feed it to readers and bloggers like babies.
Blogs must—economically and structurally—distort the news in order for the format to work.
THE WORLD IS BORING, BUT THE NEWS IS EXCITING.
the ability to find the angle on any story.
This pride and this pressure is what we media manipulators use against them.
No matter how dull, mundane, or complex a topic may be, a good reporter must find the angle. Bloggers, descended from these journalists, have to take it to an entirely new level.
“Problems occur when the journalist has to find an angle on a story that doesn’t have one.”
Bloggers latch onto the most tenuous wisps of news on places like Facebook or Twitter and then apply their “abnormal keenness” to seeing what is not there.
writers should be able to explore a story lead, find it leads nowhere, and abandon it. But that luxury is not available online.
Blogs will publish anything if you manufacture urgency around it.
Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do.
When I say it’s okay for you to make stuff up because everybody else is doing it, I’m not kidding.
Shamelessness is a virtue
One kook is hardly a problem. But the obliviousness and earnest conviction a kook maintains in their own twisted logic makes for great material for other sites to disingenuously use by reporting on what the kook reported.
Fictive interpolation on one site becomes the source for fictive interpolation on another, and again in turn for another, until the origins are eventually forgotten.
Basically, these blogs have a hustle going where one moves the ball as far as they can up the field, and then the next one takes it and in doing so reifies whatever baseless speculation was included in the first report. Jezebel needs Jim Edwards’ “reporting” to snark on, Jim Edwards needs Jezebel’s “controversy” to justify his analysis, and all this feeds into the fashion news websites who pass the articles along to their readers. Posting a comment on his blog doesn’t interrupt this cycle.
They got traffic and links by writing anything extreme about my clients, and if I wouldn’t be their source, they could make one up or get someone to lie.
companies must be on guard against the immense pressures that bloggers face to churn out exciting news
