Pay Per View Journalism

November 20, 2007 in Uncategorized

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/journalism-no-place-for-one-hit-wonders/2007/11/20/1195321743207.html?page=1

“An Australian journalist at one of the world’s most respected technology publishers says he was retrenched because his stories were not generating enough website hits.

It is one of the first cases where the firing of an Australian journalist writing text articles has been linked directly to the number of hits – or reader clicks – they generate.

The move is seen by some as an omen for journalism, a profession still coming to grips with the impact of the web and the influx of armchair publishers and part-time writers.”

In a way this is nothing new — publications have always been able to work out what their audience liked and disliked to some extent, and build their product, (and court advertisers,) accordingly.

But while in the past editors knew that longer, more considered pieces might not be the most popular, they didn’t have specific data to go by, minute-by-minute, every single day, and they weren’t held accountable to those numbers by their publishers.

Now they are.

The BBC News website, for example, has a real-time table of the most popular stories updated live online. In response to that data, and the insane popularity of “Also in the News” items — the dog who saved the school, the discovery of a new dinosaur, the man who married a goat… — the BBC created a separate section and devoted more time to those stories. That hasn’t improved their news output, but it’s generated more hits — and that’s good for advertisers. But is it good for us?

I’m skeptical about that. Places who already expressly reward page hits above quality — Gawker, for example — don’t produce great stories. And in a hypothetical world where the New York Times hired and fired based on page hits, journalistic standards could easily collapse. We could become slaves to the tragedy of the commons, and the rationale for spending time and money on serious journalism would evaporate. The internet transmits information well, but it doesn’t yet tell great stories. Ideally journalism should do both. But in a world where we are judged on page hits and not the quality of our stories, finding a place to print those stories could become all but impossible.

There are other sides to the argument, of course. People say that while only 1 percent of readers might connect to a longer story, they will stay with the publication for a lifetime when they do. But is brand loyalty like that as easy to build, and maintain, on the internet? I’m not sure it is.

What do we think about this?

Are we moving towards a world where journalists are judged day-by-day on hits and flops, and what will the impact of that be?

Michael