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

by Jill Abramson

The work I was proudest of was a book I cowrote with Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, a close friend since our teens, about the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas confirmation battle. After three years of digging, we proved that Hill’s account of being sexually harassed by Thomas was truthful. The book was a best-seller and a finalist for the National Book Award. It was made into a movie by Showtime.

In the dead of night, another reporter who had come to help had to practically steal a coffin to get him back to Beirut, where he lived with his wife and young son. Hicks had called the Times photo editor screaming that Anthony had died. His wife was waiting to reunite with him at a small hotel near the border, and I had to call her to tell her the devastating news that her husband was dead.

There was no simple reason I was fired. I was a less than stellar manager, but I also had been judged by an unfair double standard applied to many women leaders. Most of all, I became the first woman editor at a very bad time in journalism, when a failed business model was bringing into question almost every principle of journalism that I had learned during more than 30 years in the profession. I was not willing to sacrifice my ethical moorings for business exigencies. My scruples were rooted in the golden age of newspapers, which had long since passed. But I didn’t think technological change should sweep in moral change. I fought back. Perhaps my principles were too rigid; perhaps to save the Times the old strictures needed to be relaxed.

Newspapers then got used to profit margins that were 20 percent or better, and the industry came to expect fat profits as the norm. In theory and practice, however, family ownership protected papers from the vagaries of the economy and the stock market. In the economic downturn of the 1970s, for example, the Sulzbergers invested in the New York Times and added new sections on culture and food, improving both the quality and the finances of the paper.

The difference between Weymouth’s salons and the scores of such dinners that happened in Washington each night was that the lobbyists would pay to sponsor these salons, at $25,000 per event. (Sponsorship for the first 11 events was discounted to $250,000.) The unsavory new twist was offering the lobbyists the chance to buy access to Post editors and reporters, who would be seated at the table engaging in the off-the-record discussions. The appearance of impropriety was so glaring that it was hard to believe anyone at the Post would entertain such a notion.

Traffic metrics were also used in performance reviews. By 2012 the newsroom headcount had slipped below 600, and those who remained had been taught the lesson that their contributions to the mission were valued only if they showed up in the stat sheets. The Defense Department budget, for example, was not likely to generate lots of clicks, but it was a vital subject for many Post readers who worked in the industry. Brauchli tried to reassure his newsroom that metrics were not the sole measure of what journalists covered, but he insisted the numbers were instructive and couldn’t be ignored.

Chartbeat’s first client was Time.com; its second was the Wall Street Journal. And what Chartbeat told them was discouraging. Fully half of all readers who landed on a given web page gave it less than 15 seconds before moving on. “The challenge for people writing important stories,” Haile counseled, “is to write them in a not-impenetrable way.” Don’t bury the lede, for example, but that had long been a trusted axiom; Chartbeat went further, making a case for doing away with anything that could be mistaken for background, context, or introduction.

Still there was a human need for well-told, authoritative storytelling. That would never change. Saving newspapers was useless; saving journalism was vital. The riddle, of course, remained how to keep paying for the highest quality news-gathering until digital dimes became digital dollars.

Kosinski was able to build a massive trove. When he ran regressions on the data, he arrived at surprisingly specific correlations that allowed him to extrapolate major insights about a person based on minor indicators. He knew, for instance, that people who “liked” Lady Gaga on Facebook were by and large extroverts; that those who liked “thunderstorms” or “curly fries” were demonstrably intelligent, while “Harley Davidson” likers were reliably less so. Liking Prada or Sun Tzu meant a person was probably competitive; “scrapbooking” fans tended to be in relationships, while fans of track star Usain Bolt were dependably single.

These years coincided with the increased polarization of the American electorate. Facebook did not cause the political divide in the country, but it fueled the polarization because its algorithms supplied users with ever more thinly sliced news items they would agree with and be moved to share.

A specialty called data journalism, which Nate Silver had already turned into a popular franchise, was all the rage, and Silver imitators sprouted up across the news landscape, from the Post’s Wonkblog to Times’s Upshot. Horse-race coverage almost completely supplanted the space formerly given to candidates’ policy positions.

The session centered on easy fixes. Posts that evoked readers’ nostalgia for their college years “work every time”; readers liked BuzzFeed’s checklists because they lent a sense of control; social justice buzz was reliably popular because readers “think in sharing them they’re doing good.” When it came to photos, less glitz and gloss gave the impression of something more authentic. Silverman asked the table for advice: “Should we shitty up our images?”

Cramer had hoped to cover Clinton as her father had covered the 1988 presidential candidates in his classic book What It Takes, considered by many the best campaign narrative ever written.

Interesting

In compiling a postmortem report on what had just happened, Silverman found that, for one thing, the truth had been sundered over the preceding 10 months. During that time, his analysis showed, fake news stories had gone from a fringe issue to a calamity that was impossible to ignore. The top 20 fake stories on Facebook significantly outperformed the top 20 real news articles.

Sexual harassment was an endemic part of Vice’s culture. The subject came up in almost every discussion I had over the years with female Vice employees.

Duncan Watts published a comprehensive study of the Times’s coverage in the Columbia Journalism Review: “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.

As for ad revenue, there was a high road to growing audience and getting clicks and a low road. The low road was clickbait; the high road was breaking big scoops that trended on social media and got picked up by other major news outlets. That was Baron’s chosen road.

I had spent time in Denver in 2016 because I had won an award from the Colorado Press Association. The threadbare state of the local press was immediately apparent, especially at the Denver Post, a 125-year-old paper that had once been the flagship of the Singleton chain and had won nine Pulitzers. Since Alden had purchased the paper five years earlier, its newsroom had shriveled. When I met the investigations editor, a young woman in her early 20s, she told me in hushed tones that she had no staff to assign projects to, despite a rash of local corruption cases.

Scary

The Denver Post’s Chuck Plunkett had just written in his farewell editorial, “Depending on your bogeyman—whether it’s Trump Nation or P.C. Elitism—the desire to retreat to echo-chamber news outlets has grown. Local papers look more like advertising supplements filled with content from other sources, and ‘serious journalists’ are considered something only national brands can afford.”