I’ve been writing for the Examiner news service for several weeks now. That hardly makes me a seasoned journalist, but I’ve noticed a disturbing yet not surprising trend.
Payment to Examiner’s writers is based on page views, and from what I’ve learned from other writers who write professionally for a variety of news sources, this basic model is pretty common. This means that in large part, writers get paid based on how popular what they write is. If people are tickled enough to repost your article to their Facebook page or to Internet services like Digg, all the better. But again, that’s all based on the “curb appeal” of the article.
Personally, articles I write that have a sensationalist slant to them, such as the recent “Tea Party wants God to run the EPA“, receive on average an order of magnitude more readers than more thoughtful analytical pieces such as “Could big win in 2010 be bad news for GOP ?” If this were my day-job rather than a hobby, the clear incentive would be to simply repost snarky slants on outrageous news stories. After all, they are way easier to write, and generate way more profit.
This makes me concerned for journalism as a whole. News agencies increasingly don’t have staff writers working on salaries. They use freelancers like me. And our incentive is to write popular stuff that we can knock out quickly and get people to click on.
Somehow, I think this explains a lot. Even in news, catchy sound bites sell. Given that there are now an estimated eleventy-b’jillion sources for news today, the problem is simply getting noticed. Hey! Read me! Further, as news writers, we are not just competing with each other, but are struggling to get attention in a sea of LOLCats and Epic Fail videos. Content isn’t scarce, eyeballs are. In any given article, I figure I have about 5 seconds to pique your interest lest you’re surfing off to somewhere else.
It changes the way you write. But not necessarily for the better—a point lost on many of you because you stopped reading 90 seconds ago.