{"id":2431,"date":"2010-09-12T07:32:55","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T11:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=2431"},"modified":"2010-09-10T14:01:36","modified_gmt":"2010-09-10T18:01:36","slug":"whats-wrong-with-journalism-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/09\/whats-wrong-with-journalism-today.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s wrong with journalism today"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vintage_Writer\"<\/a>I’ve been writing for the Examiner news service<\/a> for several weeks now.\u00a0 That hardly makes me a seasoned journalist, but I’ve noticed a disturbing yet not surprising trend.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 This means that in large part, writers get paid based on how popular what they write is.\u00a0 If people are tickled enough to repost your article to their Facebook page or to Internet services like Digg, all the better.\u00a0 But again, that’s all based on the “curb appeal” of the article.<\/p>\n

Personally, articles I write that have a sensationalist slant to them, such as the recent “Tea Party wants God to run the EPA<\/a>“, 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 ?<\/a>”\u00a0 If this were my day-job rather than a hobby, the clear incentive would be to simply repost snarky slants on outrageous news stories.\u00a0 After all, they are way easier to write, and generate way more profit.<\/p>\n

This makes me concerned for journalism as a whole.\u00a0 News agencies increasingly don’t have staff writers working on salaries.\u00a0 They use freelancers like me.\u00a0 And our incentive is to write popular stuff that we can knock out quickly and get people to click on.<\/p>\n

Somehow, I think this explains a lot.\u00a0 Even in news, catchy sound bites sell.\u00a0 Given that there are now an estimated eleventy-b’jillion sources for news today, the problem is simply getting noticed.\u00a0 Hey! Read me!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Content isn’t scarce, eyeballs are.\u00a0 In any given article, I figure I have about 5 seconds to pique your interest lest you’re surfing off to somewhere else.<\/p>\n

It changes the way you write.\u00a0 But not necessarily for the better\u2014a point lost on many of you because you stopped reading 90 seconds ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing for the Examiner news service for several weeks now.\u00a0 That hardly makes me a seasoned journalist, but<\/p>\n

Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2431"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2437,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2431\/revisions\/2437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}