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the news is created and driven by marketers, and that no one does anything to stop it.
Hello, shitstorm of press. Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
I’m not so foolish as to expect bloggers to know what they are talking about.
“It’s all professional wrestling.
I didn’t intend to, but I’ve helped pioneer a media system designed to trick, cajole, and steal every second of the most precious resource in the world—people’s time.
There’s a famous twentieth-century political cartoon about the Associated Press that was, at the time, the wire service responsible for supplying news to the majority of the newspapers in the United States. In it an AP agent is pouring different bottles into a city’s water supply. The bottles are labeled “lies,” “prejudice,” “slander,” “suppressed facts,” and “hatred.” The image reads: “The News—Poisoned At Its Source.” I think of blogs as today’s newswires.
A blog isn’t small if its puny readership is made up of TV producers and writers for national newspapers.
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?
Blogs need traffic, being first drives traffic, and so entire stories are created out of whole cloth to make that happen.
Lindsay advised focusing “on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down,
Blogs compete to get stories first, newspapers compete to “confirm” it, and then pundits compete for airtime to opine on it.
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 but really sets you up to transition to the next level.
“Mass Media Sections That Update More Often but with Less Editorial Oversight.
Create the perception that the meme already exists and all the reporter (or the music supervisor or celebrity stylist) is doing is popularizing it.
I would register a handful of fake e-mail addresses on Gmail or Yahoo and send e-mails with a collection of all the links gathered so far and say, “How have you not done a story about this yet?
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.
The system is so primed, tuned, and ready that often it doesn’t need people like me. The monster can feed itself.
a gossip blog manufactured a scoop by misrepresenting, deliberately or not, a joke. That scoop was itself misrepresented and misinterpreted as it traveled up the chain, going from a small entertainment blog to a sports site to a CBS affiliate in Iowa and eventually to the website of one of the biggest newspapers in the country.* What spread was not even a rumor, which at least would have been logical. It was just an empty bit of nothing.
“It took just one college student to defeat a media blackout and move a story halfway around the globe within twenty-four hours,
So long as the page loads and the ads are seen, both sides are fulfilling their purpose. A click is a click.
Every decision a publisher makes is ruled by one dictum: traffic by any means.
greedy blogs have perfected what is called the “pseudo-exclusive.” In
Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one.
his Daily Dish would eventually draw more than one million visitors a month to The Atlantic.
They allow us to control what is in the media, because the media is too busy chasing profits to bother trying to stop us. They are not motivated to care.
Writers need to generate three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget’s cut.
Political analyst Nate Silver estimated that the median user-contributed article on the Huffington Post is worth only three dollars in revenue to the company.
since 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.
Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a “memo we’d just gotten from our boss.
now my personal knowledge of Gawker’s sourcing standards scares me shitless.
“If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn’t even register on their list of priorities.
“if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.
“the most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes
The angrier an article makes the reader, the better.
“Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized.
“In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality.
When examining a claim, even a dubious claim, don’t dismiss with a skeptical headline before getting to your main argument.
