Deep Media

Are Web metrics corrupting online media?

We're sup­posed to be living in an "attention econ­omy," right? But standard Web metrics don't really measure attention. Uniques, page views, monthly aver­age users—none of these take into account how long a visitor spends, whether the visitor is satisfied, or even if the visitor is human and not a bot. For all our talk of Big Data, au­di­ence measure­­ment remains a remarkably crude sci­ence. And yet, because ad­ver­­tisers and in­vestors rely on these metrics, they have a distorting effect on social media and pro­fessional media alike. This has been one source of Twitter's problems, but it's even worse with online journalism. If the sites with the most uniques win, it's easy to game the system by baiting users with value-free content. So cheese­ball aggregators like Viral­Nova—which just sold for something approaching $100 million—get rewarded, while more serious stuff is penalized. 

When people fall for crazy clickbait come-ons, you won't believe what happens next. 

I've been fasci­nated by this phenom­enon at least since 2009, when my colleague Daniel Roth pub­lished an excellent story in Wired called "The Answer Factory." It was about Demand Media, a self-aggrandizing start­up whose stated mission was to pub­lish "what the world wants to know and share"—which turned out to be a cynical euphem­ism for "what we can stuff with ads and trick peo­ple into click­ing on."

 

 

Online journalism: The imitator's dilemma?

When I talk about the future of media, one of the images I use to illustrate the transition from industrial-scale, mass-circulation newspapers to what we're seeing now is this one. It's from the August 28, 1835 edition of the New York Sun, the paper that gave rise to the "penny press," the journalistic innovators that jump-started the transition to industrial-scale mass media. Steam-powered presses were now making it possible to print far more newspapers in a couple of hours than ever before. But no matter how fast you printed them, you couldn't make money selling these papers for a penny. So The Sun, founded by a 21-year-old entre­preneur, became one of the first American news­papers to hire journalists. More stories would draw more readers, the thinking went. And Day could sell those readers to advertisers, instituting the business model that news­papers have used ever since. 

As The Sun's digital successors can tell you, attracting readers isn't all that easy. But then, two years after its founding, The Sun pulled off one of the greatest media coups of all time: an exclusive report on a civilization of moon-dwellers that had supposedly been discovered by the great astronomer Sir John Herschel, using a telescope so powerful it caught fire and burned up the observatory. Readers were agog. Even scientists were taken in. Not until weeks later did The Sun admit it was all a hoax. 

Well, at least they didn't resort to listicles. 

From VR to HBO, the top 7 meta-stories of 2014

For anyone who follows not just stories but meta-stories—that is, stories about storytelling and how it's evolving—2014 was a pretty big year. Along with twelve months of shootings, bombings, protests, invasions, and epidemics, we've witnessed profound changes in the way journalism and entertainment alike are being presented to us. Some of these developments have been building for years; others came out of the blue. Before we go rocketing into our next revolution around the sun, let's pause for a brief recap. 

1. Virtual reality gets almost real

Atop the 700-foot wall of ice in HBO's "Ascend the Wall"

Smartphones, journalism, and an elusive golden age

Can the smartphone really save journalism? Can anything save journalism? Both those questions have been raised in response to my essay in the current issue of Wired. Titled "Immerse Yourself: Why the smartphone means a golden age for journalism," the piece makes the case for the smartphone as a perfect device for getting the news—including the kind of longform journalism once thought headed for extinction.

It's a counterin­tuitive argument, which is why it appears in a slot labelled Argument, and it's generated a lot of comment on Twitter, almost all of it positive. But Dan Mitchell, who has written about such issues for Fortune and other publica­tions, wanted to know how I could be claiming a "golden age" when statehouse news bureaus around the country are all but empty. It's a fair question: Newspaper ad revenues have been plummeting for years, and papers have had to cut back severely. And while there are a number of answers, the simple one is this: Journalism and newspapers are not the same. 

I'm not arguing that all journalism's problems have been solved—far from it. But it's clear that there is a market for serious online reporting, a market that's now making the crucial transition to mobile. Just last month, for example, The New York Times reported that one of The New Yorker's most successful articles online was a 25,000-word report on Scientology, and added that mobile users are among the fastest-growing segments of the magazine's read­ership. This kind of thing is crucial—because where there's a market, there's a way. 

Journalist? What's a journalist? What the attacks on Glenn Greenwald tell us about the crisis in news

I've long been a fan of David Carr's media column in The New York Times, but yesterday's was a landmark. In a piece headlined "War on Leaks Is Pitting Journalist vs. Journalist," Carr takes on the bizarre—there's no other word for it—attacks on WikiLeaks and The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald for their role in the release of classified documents by former PFC Bradley Manning and former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden. There's only one way I can see to explain the kind of treatment they've been getting: as a sign of the identity crisis that is overtaking con­ventional journalism in a time of threat. 

Both Bradley and Snowden were acting very much in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of a top-secret US government report on Vietnam some four decades ago exposed a systematic pattern of lies to both Congress and the public. Though he was charged with crimes by the government, Ellsberg was lionized by the media, and The New York Times won a Pulitzer for reporting his revelations. Today, however, the story is very different. Witness Greenwald's appearance on Meet the Press, when, as Carr points out, he was asked why he himself should not be charged with a crime for having "aided and abetted" Snowden. And that was only the start of it, as this commentary by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks makes clear: 

The Colbert Super PAC: Magic happens!

Among the immersive media experiences we spotlighted at SXSW's Immersion 101 discussion last spring was Stephen Colbert's faux presidential campaign, which started on The Colbert Report and grew to include not only stump speeches but the formation of an actual Super PAC. Launched in response to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which struck down government-imposed limits on "independent" political spending by corporations and the like as an affront to free speech, the Colbert Super PAC was no joke. Through an outrageous series of segments on his Comedy Central show, Colbert and his attorney, former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, demonstrated just how ridiculous—and appalling—the rules on Super PACs are. A couple of weeks after SXSW, Colbert's Super PAC—Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which by that point had raised more that $1 million—won a Peabody Award, one of America's top prizes in journalism. “What an honor! I am truly speechless. Luckily, thanks to Citizens United, my money can speak for me,” Colbert tweeted in response. 

Now, of course, the campaign is over, the big money lost, and Colbert's lust for power has abated. But not, apparently, his appetite for money. Last night, in a final demonstration of the kind of abuses the Super PAC regulations permit, Potter told Colbert how to dispose of the fund's remaining $800,000 in a way that would make him very, very happy. For anybody with leftover campaign dollars out there, this video is highly instructive.