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July 24 - August 1, 2020
Simplifying the content and ceding control of the distribution to the audience were the touchstones of Peretti’s contagious discovery. This line of work, he realized, did not require particular brilliance or originality. Rather it demanded above all a receptiveness to the whims and weaknesses of the masses. The internet was a burgeoning lifeline for people who otherwise lacked sufficient distractions from their daily toil. It was the perfect moment, Peretti determined, to introduce the opiate they longed for.
It took only six months for the Huffington Post to surpass the web traffic of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Some staffers almost never left the long plastic tables where they sat at computer screens finding stories already published elsewhere on the web, lifting and quickly repackaging them as Huffington Post originals, and siphoning off advertising that might otherwise have gone to the actual creators.
He developed a perversely fraternal rapport with the men in advertising departments and to win their business would send them “cool” goodies in the mail. (Some, unsurprisingly, were illicit.) His strategy for sealing deals with the women clients, he bragged, was to take them to bed.
If advertisers remained wary of the magazine, the hipsters loved it. It was much edgier than BuzzFeed, with its cuddly “No Haters” ethos. It was a shameless assertion of masculine id, the epitome of a new brand of North American lad culture. Vice was shocking, transgressive, seductive; the devil opposite BuzzFeed’s angel on readers’ shoulders.
Another ill-timed move was buying from the Washington Post the 50 percent stake the Times didn’t already own in the International Herald Tribune. The English-language paper, which had provided travelers and ex-pats the best of both newspapers, was based in Paris, where labor costs were astronomical and headcount almost impossible to trim.
Ah France...
classified ads, which formerly accounted for millions of dollars in ad revenue, had been wiped out by Craigslist, a free internet bulletin board that lured away the “for sale” ads, and Monster.com and other sites, which grabbed the “help wanted” and “job wanted” ads. Once-strong advertising categories like travel and autos were also getting hammered by digital competitors such as Expedia and AutoTrader. Movie companies and even Broadway theater owners had new digital methods of reaching ticket-buyers that made them less dependent on advertising in the Times—and on its critics’ reviews.
Good summary but needs quantification!
John S. Carroll, the L.A. Times editor who swept away the Staples mess and then walked out rather than strip down his newsroom, used the time after his exit to survey the capsized world of newspapers. This was the only world he had ever known; the news was in his blood. His father, Wallace Carroll, had been the beloved Washington editor of the New York Times and later the editor and publisher of the newspaper in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His son too had never wanted to be anything other than a newspaper editor. As John mulled over the problems facing his beloved industry, he concluded the
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carroll_(journalist)
The only way to sustain profits seemed to be to cut personnel. Each journalist cost nearly half a million dollars when you added in healthcare costs and other coverage fees. The old-timers cost even more. Thinning the herd was the only way to achieve significant savings. So the newsroom shrank from almost 1,000 journalists to 640 over the next seven years.
Classified ads made up 40 percent of the Post’s revenue—far more than for the Times—and were wiped out virtually overnight by the advent of Craigslist, Monster.com, and other online services. It seemed no amount of cutting could forestall the nosedive of the company’s stock price, from nearly $1,000 a share to under $400.
Zuckerberg was unusually thoughtful but, “by a mile, the shyest, most awkward 20-year-old I had ever met.” He also seemed remarkably untutored in business fundamentals, Graham remembered. “The future tech titan did not then know the difference between revenues and profits.” Talks continued for the next two months.
The Times existed to discomfit the affluent and highly educated in order to get them engaged in global issues.
Most important, it would calculate the ratio of people who’d found the post themselves to those who’d landed there by clicking on a link their friend had shared. This was called Social Lift, and while the engineers acknowledged there was no such thing as “one metric to rule them all,” and some debunked the phenomenon, Social Lift mattered at BuzzFeed.
When a writer was ready to release a post, he or she was encouraged to come up with as many as eight different potential headlines and several options for the accompanying photo. Nguyen’s software would then publish each permutation of these inputs, so that for a few minutes a dozen or more versions of the post would bounce around the internet, each appearing to different readers. Once her machine collected a sufficient data sample on the relative popularity of each rendition, the computer would select the best-performing one and eliminate the others.
Social media users were getting used to scrolling briskly through their friends’ posts. The sheer volume of photos, stories, updates, and opinions shared made it impossible to do otherwise. Settling into a substantive read carried an increasingly steep opportunity cost.
Interesting - I hadn't thought of it this way before. If I see a feed with 100 items, and I read just one (because its good), I will feel like I'm missing out on everything else. So how much content we put in front of people matters as they will to some extent feel pressure to consume it all.
“BuzzFeed has a major role to play in the coming years, to fill the hole left by the ongoing decline of print newspapers and magazines,” he wrote to his staff in the early fall of 2013. “The world needs sustainable, profitable, vibrant content companies staffed by dedicated professionals; especially content for people that grew up on the web, whose entertainment and news interests are largely neglected by television and newspapers.”
The dashboard showed an impressive completion rate, users who read the whole thing.
Cool they have this metric
a widget that scrutinized not just how many people shared a particular article but who shared them. If an exposé of racism in the American South was shared by the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, this was a valuable data point.
These people were cool, funny, and unpredictable. In the context of civil society, they were hardly even presentable. Civility was boring; it was to be subverted whenever possible. Vice had made its name as a tireless force of subversion.
“Let’s have 14 bottles of wine at dinner, roast suckling pig, and a story about chopping a dude’s head off in the desert,” was how he once described his approach to life. He was a self-identified “bon vivant, storyteller, drunk.”
Davis had edited a freelancer’s article, headlined “It’s Time to Start Boycotting the NFL,” and okayed it for publication before his higher-ups could intervene on behalf of the League, a potential business client. What ensued was a series of chastisements and injunctions from a more senior editor, who clarified Vice protocol in an email to Davis: “Any ‘brand’ mention—basically any mention of a large entity that we might be making some kind of business deal with—should get run up the flagpole to Hosi [Simon],” Vice’s global general manager. Davis noted, “In my experience, every single
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Example of advertising dictating content - not good for journalism!
Editors had incentive to push out the older writers to save the jobs of younger, more productive rookies.
The average age of the newsroom was near 60 because few left so graciously.
A friend at a big paper told me how true this was.
The 24/7 digital news cycle destroyed old customs such as repairing to nearby bars after the presses started to roll at 9 p.m.
In talks that went on until Thanksgiving, he offered his money, but at the enormous interest rate of 14 percent. He bargained for warrants to buy 16 million shares of Times stock in six years for $6.36 a share, which would give him a 17 percent stake in the company.
Biznico, rechristened DealBook, would angle for a Wall Street audience that might be willing to pay extra for a premium product of scoops about deals. It would be the first of what Sulzberger envisioned as a group of premium products both in print and on the web.
Nate Silver, a popular political blogger who created FiveThirtyEight, licensed his site to the Times, and alongside Sorkin would come to represent a new breed of reporter, better known as individuals than belonging to the institution.
Within the first weeks the gurus were proven wrong. Despite the internet ethos of free news, 324,000 readers signed up for digital subscriptions, far more than the Times had expected.
The unexpectedly strong results were a feather in the cap of David Perpich, Sulzberger’s nephew, who was coleader of the team that developed the pay model.
Go Dave!
The real answer, however, may have been that the internet, with so much free content, had become a news sewer. Certain discerning customers were now willing to pay for news of immense quality from a trusted source.
I did not want audience data or popular subjects that would drive new subscriptions to be the main priorities for our journalism.
Why not? Serve the customer. I mean, I get the tension about popular subjects, but I don't get not creating content that would lead to subscriptions.
The story, called “Snow Fall,” chronicled a fatal avalanche near a ski resort in Washington State that killed three backcountry skiers. In some ways it was the type of disaster story commonly told in newspapers. What made “Snow Fall” dramatic was the way it made elaborate multimedia elements an organic part of the storytelling and reading experience. Three-dimensional graphics showed the routes the skiers took down the mountain as readers scrolled through the story. Video testimony from the characters popped up as the reader absorbed their parts of the story. Some of the skiers wore cameras on
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I loved Snow Fall! That article alone reformed the whole publishing world to use huge screen-wide images at the top of each article, something Medium and many others still do. I also still think that article shows the future of books... sigh.
But once there I could not bear to deliver bad news. The Chinese journalists were so idealistic about the Times, and their effort to continue publishing was so valiant. I would find the savings somewhere else in the news department’s budget.
As written, this is a weak and poor decision. But I don't have all the facts.
With so many taking buyouts, it would have been torture to have individual goodbye toasts—they’d be happening by the hour—so there would be just one big farewell party. The invite read, “They Took the Cash, Now Watch Them Get Smashed.”
He was overheard bragging that he had squeezed 200 jobs from the newsroom without a noticeable decline in the paper’s quality. (Regardless of what the data said, this simply wasn’t true.)
How does she know?
BlogPOST, an aggregation of news stories trending elsewhere on the web, had a 20-something writer in charge of reglossing stories with a bit of her own reporting and fact-checking.
Does this still exist? A google search says no.
Kaplan had kept the Washington Post afloat for years. Now the education business too, that buoy, was severely wounded. Following the sting investigation, the number of new students enrolled in Kaplan colleges plummeted by nearly half, while revenues fell by more than three-quarters. In the span of four months, its stock price dropped by nearly one-fourth.
I hadn't realized that Kaplan's decline was a big motivator to selling the Post.
The bald but boyish-looking 49-year-old was a notoriously competitive businessman, and people close to him spoke of his peculiar fascination with broken business models. He was intrigued enough about the telephone call to begin looking at some research on the decline of newspapers and wondered whether the Post, having been cut to the quick, could ever fully heal. On the other hand, he knew from Amazon’s book sales and his success with the Kindle tablet that people were reading more than ever.
It's true - people are still reading! I dislike the narrative that some people seem to have that "people don't read anymore".
Zuckerberg’s early backer Peter Thiel was a student of the philosopher René Girard, who came up with the concept of “mimetic desire” and invoked it to explain Facebook’s essence. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind,” Girard wrote. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” In other words, monkey see, monkey do.
News became a game of presenting a version of the day’s events that would electrify conversation on the social network. As such, it was a field that was now wide open for new players; the barrier to entry had been all but toppled.
Eventually industrious reporters in newsrooms across the country got into the habit of tipping off Drudge and Breitbart anytime they had a big “get.” (I did this when I was Washington bureau chief of the Times.) Reporters recognized that a mention on the Drudge Report greatly amplified their exposure, thereby advancing their careers.
In 1998 the two-man newsroom broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, juicy details of the Oval Office rendezvous, and the explosive fact that Newsweek had axed the scoop, all from three time zones away. It was a double whammy: the potential undoing of a Democratic president as well as incontrovertible proof of liberal media complicity, a supposed conspiracy at the highest levels.
Breitbart News arose out of, and in service to, an amorphous type of antiestablishment thinking, an identity defined principally by what it was against.
All told during this period, Trump received $3 billion worth of free media coverage.
That's crazy. And that's his genius I suppose.
Looking at Facebook through analytical tools like CrowdTangle, Silverman explained, you could plainly see that the most successful posts were often ones that played to bias and emotion.
One key tool in the campaign’s appeal to voters was an ad-placing product Facebook offered, called the Dark Post. An ad could be placed in the News Feed of users with whom the message was supposed to resonate, and it would be invisible to anyone outside of that target audience. It was a way to segment a population without its members noticing they had been segmented, a means of perpetuating a state of informational asymmetry, a tool that could be used to divide and confuse.
Ok, this just sounds like a targeted ad that she is trying to describe as if it's something ominous.
He ran the blog for 11 years before Poynter acquired it in 2015. Over that time his focus shifted from correction etiquette to the higher-order concern of how journalists verify information in the first place. He researched common pitfalls and best practices and compiled a comprehensive handbook on verification.
The editor of the Indian bureau, which was focused on creating buzz to quickly increase its national audience, expressed uneasiness that her staffers seemed intimidated whenever she assigned them a story with actual news value. The solution to calming them was simply not to use the word “news” when describing the assignment.
Sad
Frequenting the rougher, raunchier haunts of the social web, he saw unspeakable, racist things being said, shared, and spreading. What took him aback, though, was that the increasingly deplorable discourse was no longer confined to these insular chatrooms.
Fittingly, he called it NewsFeed.
Great name for a BuzzFeed news product, but I think it's taken by FB.
