Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts

by Jill Abramson

Smith’s operating theory for why Vice News would succeed was that young people were turned off by TV news, not because they weren’t interested in the world but because of how the news was presented.

Vice was also one of the few media companies that had figured out a surefire business model: taking gobs of other people’s money to produce content, both documentaries and ads. It was a content farm, producing an astounding 7,000 different pieces a day. (For comparison, the New York Times published 200 to 300 individual pieces a day.) Most of this content was not conventional news but Vice’s curious blend of entertaining documentaries full of adventure, danger, and immersive plots.

There was, at least on paper, a human resources office. But employees saw the woman in charge, Nancy Ashbrooke, as the protector and enabler of management. She had come to Vice from Harvey Weinstein’s film company.

In February an advertiser who sponsored one of Vice’s verticals told me her company was quietly withdrawing. The reasons were complicated. It wasn’t the sexual misconduct per se. “The culture felt a bit like a forced effort to reproduce a Hunter S. Thompson vibe,” she said. “It grew even more contrived, and there were no women at the table, which goes beyond misogynistic. We have largely walked away, although in truth, I’m not sure Shane knows it.”

The underlying problem was competition in the branded ad business. New players from old newspapers, such as T Brand Studios, had joined the fray, fighting for leftovers as Facebook and Google, which owned YouTube, devoured the vast majority of digital ad dollars.

Usually at the Times election stories were planned and prewritten in anticipation of either candidate winning, but this time the editors had prepared almost nothing for the unthinkable, a Trump win. Instead, a special section devoted to the election of the first woman president was ready to go.

This is really amazing. They really thought (and so did I) that he had no chance.

“In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” Cable and the networks, as they had for decades, followed the Times’s lead.

Because clicks were the metric.

The competition between the Times and the Post made each paper stronger; rather than heated enmity, there was camaraderie between the editors and reporters, working together to cover a hostile, lying president and one of the most secretive administrations in history.

The most polarizing presidential candidate in U.S. history had changed journalism in other healthy ways. The belief that objectivity required providing equal weight to differing points of view began to erode. The “on the one hand, on the other” style of reporting did damage by creating a false equivalency of arguments, especially when Trump was purposefully undermining the truth.

The Times received $12 million from Samsung to run a visual news feature called “The Daily 360,” which used a new, 360-degree Samsung camera to produce panoramic pictures that got prominent placement on the Times homepage. Often these big displays took up real estate that could have been filled by real news, causing grumbling among the heads of the news desks.

Circulation had brought in a meager 26 percent of revenue at the Times at the turn of the millennium; by 2017, on the strength of new digital subscribers and the devoted readers of the hard-copy edition, it had leaped to 64 percent.

Although the editors reassured the troops that they were not engaged in “an arms race for page views,” a number of journalists believed all of these changes were dumbing down the paper and that editors were too focused on how many clicks stories got. Unlike the Post, the Times did not have screens displaying the constantly changing popularity data, although the homepage showed which stories were trending.

The ever-growing T Studio had created 235 native ad campaigns for more than 100 clients, with branches in London and Hong Kong. With a staff of 130, it was bigger than the newsroom of Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, once a profitable part of the Times Mirror chain. Brand advertising gave some laid-off journalists a new line of work. In 2017 Thompson said he expected T Studio to generate more than $50 million.

The news editors struggled to align with Thompson’s ambitious budget targets for 2020 and their response sent everyone into a tizzy. It called for the elimination of “lower value” editing and ending the practice of having many editors touch the same copy to buff it to Times standards.

This is frightening. Need to invest in AI to help do this better.

The new plan also called for the elimination of all 100 copy editors. They were the editors who never got the glory, but they kept opinion from seeping into the news and saved the paper from misspellings, wrong titles, grammatical errors, and more serious mistakes.

Prakash had a diagnosis for what had failed before Bezos’s rescue. Like other legacy newspapers, it had tried to bolt the web operation onto the existing print publishing system without compromising the resources of the newspaper. This was a print-first approach. The plumbing was for the newspaper, and the pipes were often rusty. Prakash felt that for the Post to flourish online, the product, design, technology, and journalism would have to be remade as one seamless system, tailored to the needs of digital users. That’s what he and his 80 engineers set out to do with a new invention they called Arc.

The electronic screen that loomed over its editorial hub showing the second-by-second traffic for every story and piece of content—some 500 items a day, twice as many as the Times—said it all.

More than most, BuzzFeed had embraced the crusading tone of the old tabloid press.

Lol

In published rankings of what news sources people found most engaging, none of the four companies that were featured in this book appeared at the top. The metrics company, which measured news outlets by likes, comments, reactions, and shares, ranked Fox News in first place in April 2018, with more than 30 million engagements. London’s Daily Mail rose to fourth from seventh, and a site called Daily Wire, which specialized in conservative news, climbed to eighth with 14 million engagements.

Seems like a better algorithm is needed!