No one will be surprised to hear that as a kid I was a newspaper junkie. I delivered papers in the New York suburbs: the Times and the Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the Post, the World-Telegram and Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Journal-American, and the Jersey papers, too. I read them all.
I still prefer print, but I do also read online.
A certain phrase keeps jumping out at me from my online news reading: “Here’s what to know.” It seems to appear in headlines everywhere.
“Here’s What to Know About the Cough Syrup Scandal,” the Times advised last fall. “Supreme Court to issue abortion pill ruling on Friday. Here’s what to know,” the Boston Globe told us last month. “Will pilot strikes disrupt my summer flights?” asked a Washington Post headline. “Here’s what to know.”
I feel sure that in all my years of reading print newspapers, I have never come across a headline saying “Here’s what to know.” What changed to make it necessary for news organizations to persuade us that what we’re about to read is actually worth knowing?
One thing that changed was the sheer volume of stuff out there. The overwhelming flood of information (and nonsense) on the internet created an intense battle for attention and eyeballs, fueled by social media. That led directly to the invention of clickbait, verbal and visual tricks advertisers and publishers use to get browsers to choose their “content.” And that’s exactly what “Here’s what to know” is: a genteel version of “What happened next will shock you!”
In a new book called Traffic, former BuzzFeed News editor and New York Times columnist Ben Smith lays out how the pursuit of internet traffic has completely transformed the news business. He describes a gradual corrosion of the profession, in which journalistic principles took a back seat to the imperatives of driving as many eyeballs as possible to company websites, spearheaded by ruthless entrepreneurs like Matt Drudge and Steve Bannon. All of which finally led to algorithms taking the place of editors in determining what should be published and promoted.
“In dreamy moods, I sometimes fantasize about journalism dropping out of the game — not chasing traffic, not following this year’s wisdom, not offering audiences everything they could possibly want in hastiest form,” writes Nathan Heller in the New Yorker’s review of Smith’s book.
At the Independent, we’re too busy talking to people to find good stories — what to know, if you will — to pay much attention to web traffic. Actually, Heller’s fantasy sounds a lot like my idea of an excellent small weekly newspaper. “Imagine producing as little as you could as best you could,” he writes. “It would be there Monday, when the week began, and there Friday, the tree standing after the storm. And imagine the audience’s pleasure at finding it, tall and expansive and waiting for a sunny day. In an age of traffic, such deliberateness could be radical. It could be, I think, the next big thing.”
