TACTIC #9
THE WORLD IS BORING, BUT THE NEWS IS EXCITING. IT’S a paradox of modern life. Journalists and bloggers are not magicians, but if you consider the material they’ve got to work with and the final product they crank out day in and day out, you must give them some credit. Shit becomes sugar.
If there is one special skill that journalists can claim, it is the ability to find the angle on any story. That the news is ever chosen over entertainment in the fight for attention is testament to their skill. High-profile bloggers rightly take great pride in this ability. This pride and this pressure is what we media manipulators use against them. Pride goeth before the fall.
No matter how dull, mundane, or complex a topic may be, a good reporter must find the angle. Bloggers, descended from these journalists, have to take it to an entirely new level. They need to find not only the angle but the click-driving headline, an eye-catching image; generate comments and links; and in some cases, squeeze in some snark. And they have to do it up to a dozen times a day without the help of an editor. They can smell the angle of a story like a shark smells blood in the water. Because the better the angle, the more the blogger gets paid.
As Drew Curtis of Fark.com says, “Problems occur when the journalist has to find an angle on a story that doesn’t have one.” It’s not a new criticism, as the Washington Post wrote in 1899:
The New York Times has such abnormal keenness of vision that it is occasionally able to see that which does not exist. The ardency of its desire sometimes overcomes the coolness of its reasons, so that the thing it wants to see shows up just where it wants it to be, but in so intangible a form that no other eye is able to detect, no other mind finds ground to suspect its presence.1
The difference between the New York Times and blogs a century later is that the New York Times was dealing with at least somewhat worthy material. Bloggers latch onto the most tenuous wisps of news on places like Facebook or Twitter and then apply their “abnormal keenness” to seeing what is not there. A writer for the Mediabistro blog 10,000 Words once advised new bloggers that they could find good material by scanning community bulletin boards on craigslist for “what people are complaining about these days.”2 I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t qualify as representative news. Considering that anyone can post anything on craigslist, this gives me a pretty good idea of how to create some fake local news. If they don’t mind seeing what isn’t there, I’m happy to help.
Angle-hunters sometimes come up empty. In a perfect world, writers should be able to explore a story lead, find it leads nowhere, and abandon it. But that luxury is not available online. As the veteran bloggers John Biggs and Charlie White put it in their book Blogger Boot Camp, there is “no topic too mundane that you can’t pull a post out of it.”
This is their logic. As a marketer, it’s easy to fall in love with it.
Blogs will publish anything if you manufacture urgency around it. Give a blogger an illusionary twenty-minute head start over other media sources, and they’ll write whatever you want, however you want it. Publicists love to promise blogs the exclusive on an announcement. The plural there is not an accident. You can give the same made-up exclusive to multiple blogs, and they’ll all fall over themselves to publish first. Throw in an arbitrary deadline, like “We’re going live with this on our website first thing in the morning,” and even the biggest blogs will forget fact-checking and make bold pronouncements on your behalf.
Since bloggers must find an angle, they always do. Small news is made to look like big news. Nonexistent news is puffed up and made into news. The result is stories that look just like their legitimate counterparts, only their premise is wrong and says nothing. Such stories hook onto false pretenses, analyze a false subject, and inform falsely.
When I say it’s okay for you to make stuff up because everybody else is doing it, I’m not kidding. MG Siegler is, and he’s one of the dominant voices in tech blogging (TechCrunch, PandoDaily). According to him, most of what he and his competitors write is bullshit. “I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it, like 80%,” he once admitted, “but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.”3 I’d commend him for coming clean, but this uncharacteristic moment of self-awareness in 2012 hasn’t seemed to have changed his blogging habits.
Shamelessness is a virtue in Siegler’s world. It helps create nothing from something. It helps people at the Huffington Post stomach creating stories like: “Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners.” The same holds true for reputable outlets too. They need only the slightest push to abandon all discretion, like the Daily Mail in the UK did when I had some deliberately provocative ads posted on the American Apparel website and pretended they were part of a new campaign. “Has American Apparel Gone too Far with ‘Creepy’ Controversial New Campaign?” the Mail’s headline read. According to whom had it gone too far? The article quotes “Some Tweeters.”4
Thanks for the free publicity, guys! God knows what it would have cost to pay to run those full page ads in their paper.
Whatever will be more exciting, get more pageviews, that is what blogs will say happened. Like when Gawker bought a scoop from man who had pictures of a wild Halloween night with politician Christine O’Donnell. According to editor Remy Stern, the skeevy man’s one concern was “that a tabloid would imply that they had sex, which they did not.” The headline of the Gawker article was…drumroll…“I Had a One-Night Stand With Christine O’Donnell.”5
ALWAYS WRONG, NEVER IN DOUBT
At American Apparel I had to deal with a pesky blog called BNET on which a “reporter” named Jim Edwards would troll through the company’s financial disclosures and come up with some of the most fantastical misinterpretations I could imagine. We invited this on ourselves. Having made the company and its advertising such a juicy subject for gossip and entertainment blogs, it was natural that other pageview-hungry writers would try to get in on the game. Still, even as I knowingly fed that monster, I did not expect what happened with Edwards.
The man once asked critically—in a blog post, not a request for comment—why the company did not roll a last-minute necessary-to-make-payroll personal loan from Dov Charney at 6 percent interest into the larger loan from investors at 15 percent interest? (I assume the answer is so obvious to normal people like you that I do not need to explain how 6 percent is less than 15 percent.) Edwards posed this question not once but several times, in several posts, each with a more aggressive headline (e.g., “How American Apparel’s CEO Turned a Crisis Into a Pay Raise”).
From our conversation after he published his post:
Me: “I don’t know if you recall, but we discussed your assertion about the 6% interest rate…. You issued a correction on this story in 2009.”
Jim Edwards: “I do recall. But I’m quoting the status of Charney’s loans directly from the proxy. Is the proxy wrong?”
Me: YOUR BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF MATH IS WRONG!
He made bold speculations, like, “Why American Apparel CEO Must Resign” and “Is American Apparel’s CEO Facing the Endgame?” In retrospect he seems even more foolish, since not a single one of his predictions turned out to be right. Or he’d concoct ridiculous conspiracy theories, including one that accused the company of timing controversial ads with SEC-mandated announcements to distract the public from corrupt dealings inside the company—and as proof would use the very nonexistent loan scandal he’d uncovered. (Not to mention that the ads weren’t new, and some weren’t even actual ads—just fake ones I’d leaked online.)
One kook is hardly a problem. But the obliviousness and earnest conviction a kook maintains in their own twisted logic makes for great material for other sites to disingenuously use by reporting on what the kook reported. As part of the CBS Interactive Business Network, Edwards’s blog on BNET featured the CBS logo at the top. Since he looked like he had some official industry status, his questions became fodder for fashion websites at the national level.
Fictive interpolation on one site becomes the source for fictive interpolation on another, and again in turn for another, until the origins are eventually forgotten. To paraphrase Charles Horton Cooley, the products of our imagination become the solid facts of society. It’s a process that happens not horizontally but vertically, moving each time to a more reputable site and seeming more real at each level. And so, in Edwards’s case, American Apparel was forced to deal with a constant stream of controversy borne of one man’s uncanny ability to create an angle where there wasn’t one. (He was rewarded soon after with a new gig at…Business Insider!)
Imagine if an enemy had decided to use him as a cat’s paw, as I have done with other such bloggers. The damage could have been even worse. As I wrote to a company attorney at the time, who mistakenly believed we could “reason” with the blogger:
Basically, these blogs have a hustle going where one moves the ball as far as they can up the field, and then the next one takes it and in doing so reifies whatever baseless speculation was included in the first report. Jezebel needs Jim Edwards’ “reporting” to snark on, Jim Edwards needs Jezebel’s “controversy” to justify his analysis, and all this feeds into the fashion news websites who pass the articles along to their readers. Posting a comment on his blog doesn’t interrupt this cycle.
Neither would the lawsuit the lawyer was considering. It would just give Edwards more to talk about. In this situation I was tasked with defending a company against exactly the type of subtle mischaracterizations and misleading information that I use on behalf of other clients. The insanity of that fact is not lost on me. What makes it all the more scary in this case is that there wasn’t someone like me behind the scenes, exerting influence over the information the public saw. The system was manipulating itself—and I was called in to mitigate that manipulation—with more manipulation.
What else could I expect? Early on I worked tirelessly to encourage bloggers to find nonexistent angles on stories I hoped they would promote. I made it worth their while—dangling pageviews, traffic, access, and occasionally advertising checks to get it going. After a point they no longer needed me to get those things. They got traffic and links by writing anything extreme about my clients, and if I wouldn’t be their source, they could make one up or get someone to lie. Other advertisers were happy to profit from stories at our expense. The Jezebel/Edwards cycle wasn’t some conspiracy; it was partly my creation.
It should be obvious that companies must be on guard against the immense pressures that bloggers face to churn out exciting news to their advantage. Do something perfectly innocent—prepare to have it wrenched out of context into a blog post. Do something complicated—expect to have it simplified until it’s unrecognizable. It goes in both directions. Do nothing—you can still turn it into something. Do something wrong, don’t despair; you can spin it beyond comprehension. If you play in this world as a manipulator, prepare for faux outrage (which becomes real outrage) when you don’t deserve it, and expect actual violators to get off without a peep. Those are the economics in the angle-hungry world of Jim Edwards.
It’s why I can safely say that all the infamous American Apparel controversies were made up. Either I made them up or bloggers did. To the public, this process was all invisible. Only as an insider was I able to know that bloggers were seeing that which was not there. They had been so trained to find “big stories” that they hardly knew the difference between real and made up.
It’s even hard for me to avoid falling for the occasional confabulations myself—there are too many, and they are often too pervasive to completely resist. For that reason, even some employees at American Apparel succumbed to the persistent accusations of people like Edwards and began to believe them. The accumulation of “reporting” trumped their own personal experience. There are thousands of these unnamed and unknown victims out there, collateral damage in a system where bloggers and marketers can just make stuff up.