JOURNALISTS HAVE AN ANNOYING TENDENCY to insert themselves in the center of the narrative. They assume that their problems are the world’s problems, that their conversations with a taxi driver reflect the totality of human experience. This narcissism makes it hard to see the moments when journalism’s plight is actually emblematic of American economic life.
Over the last generation, journalism has slowly been swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some prefer to call themselves technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, from both within and without. Over the past decade, journalism has come to depend unhealthily on Facebook and Google. The big tech companies supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience—and therefore a big chunk of revenue. This gives Silicon Valley influence over the entire profession, and it has made the most of its power.
Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media to ink terrible deals, which look like self-preserving necessities, but really just allow Facebook and Google to hold them even tighter. Media will grant Facebook the right to sell advertising or give Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. They like to shift quickly in a radically different direction, which is great for their bottom line, but terrible for all the media companies dependent on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or that its users prefer ideologically pleasing propaganda to hard news. When Facebook shifts direction like this or when Google tweaks its algorithm, they instantly crash Web traffic flowing to media, with all the rippling revenue ramifications that follow. Media know they should flee the grasp of Facebook, but dependence also breeds cowardice. The prisoner lies on the cot dreaming of escape plans that will never hatch.
Dependence on the big tech companies is increasingly the plight of the worker and the entrepreneur. Drivers maintain erratic patterns of sleep because of Uber’s shifting whims. Companies that manufacture tchotchkes sold on Amazon watch their businesses collapse when Amazon’s algorithms detect the profitability of their item, leading the giant to manufacture the goods itself at a lower price. The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability. It’s the way in which the tech companies dictate the patterns of work, the way in which their influence can shift the ethos of an entire profession to suit their needs—lowering standards of quality, eroding ethical protections. I saw this up close during my time at the New Republic. I watched how dependence on the tech companies undermined the very integrity of journalism. At the very beginning of that chapter in my career, I never imagined that we would go down that path.
• • •
CHRIS HUGHES WAS A MYTHICAL SAVIOR—boyishly innocent, fantastically rich, intellectually curious, unexpectedly humble, and proudly idealistic. My entire career at the New Republic had been spent dreaming of such a benefactor. For many years, we drifted from one ownership group to the next, each eager to save the magazine and its historic mission. But these investors either lacked the resources to invest in our future or didn’t have quite enough faith to fully commit. We kept cranking out magazines, but haunted by the specter of getting offloaded to a Russian oligarch or an ideological fanatic. It was an unending search for patronage that exhausted me. I resigned as editor in 2010. A year later, the New Republic entered yet another pressing hunt for a new owner. And then Chris walked through the door.
When Chris first invited me for a chat, we wandered aimlessly across downtown Washington, paper coffee cups in our hands. It was a jacketless day in earliest spring. We settled on the stone steps of a Georgian church. In those first weeks of his ownership, Chris booked himself an endless listening tour. He seemed eager to speak with anyone who had worked at the magazine, or might have a strong opinion about it. But as we talked, it seemed clear that he wanted something more than my advice. He began to hint that he might want me to return to my old job.
The owners of the New Republic had always been older men, who had settled into their wealth and strong opinions. Chris was intriguingly different. He was twenty-eight years old, and his enthusiasm for learning made him feel even younger. “When I first heard the New Republic was for sale,” he told me, “I went to the New York Public Library and began to read.” He ordered up microfiche from the stacks. From each decade of the magazine’s hundred-year existence, he selected a year’s worth of issues to plow through. The romance of the magazine’s history—its storied slate of writers, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Ralph Ellison, James Wood—ignited his imagination and loosened his hold on his wallet.
College had been a blur, he explained. His Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg had hatched Facebook. This proximity proved lucrative beyond any plausible dream. Chris became the company’s first head of publicity, even though he remained in Cambridge as his buddies decamped to Silicon Valley. But that was Chris. He always spoke of Facebook with an endearing detachment. “I don’t spend much time on the site,” he once confessed over dinner. Besides, the source of his fortune didn’t define him. What he really loved was literature. During his honeymoon, he read War and Peace; he would sit waiting for appointments with an edition of Balzac in the original French. The leather ottoman in his SoHo apartment was topped with piles of the New York Review of Books, and seemingly every literary journal published in the English language. The New Republic was going to be the liberal arts experience he was too distracted to enjoy at Harvard.
Despite having hundreds of millions in stock, he seemed indifferent to his wealth, or at least conflicted by it. He would get red-faced when people pointed out that he owned two estates and a spacious loft; he was apt to wear the same blazer every day of the week. So much positive media attention had flowed in his direction, he saw no need to cultivate more. At meetings, he would quietly recede. He hated the idea of fixing himself at the head of the table and pontificating, which had been a long-standing perk of owning the New Republic.
As we sat on the steps, he began to lay out his plans for the magazine. It felt a bit restrained and a little aimless, a mélange of incremental improvements, adding an interview, shortening book reviews.
“Why aren’t you being bolder?” I asked.
“Show me how to be bolder,” he replied.
• • •
MANY MONTHS LATER, our relationship would sour, but our first days working together were exhilarating. As a brash outsider, he had no interest in blindly adhering to received wisdom. When we set out to rebuild the New Republic’s Web site, we talked ourselves into striking a reactionary stance. Instead of chasing traffic, our home page would aggressively eschew such notions. We would resist the impulse to clutter it with an endless stream of clicky content, splayed with little sense of hierarchy. Our digital pages would prize beauty and finitude; they would sacrifice any ambitions for a broad audience and would brashly announce the idealism of our project—which he would describe as nothing less than the preservation of cultural seriousness and long-form journalism.
Romantic idealism wasn’t enough to satisfy Chris. He always believed that he could turn the New Republic into a profitable enterprise—or at least grow revenue enough that he could trumpet his success in press releases that would make us an even hotter book. But Chris’s rhetoric about profit never seemed entirely sincere. “I hate selling ads,” he would tell me over and over. “It makes me feels seedy.” And for more than a year, he was willing to spend with abandon.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should have been more disciplined about the checks we, I mean he, wrote. It wasn’t hard to foresee the inevitable frustration that would emerge when he finally paid close attention to the financials. But he had a weakness for leasing offices in prime locations and hiring top-shelf consultants. I had a weakness for handsomely paying writers to travel the globe, commissioning pieces as if I were a fancy New York editor. Since the window of his beneficence would surely close, I moved quickly to hire a large staff, which included experienced writers and editors who didn’t come cheap. But he didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve never been so happy or fulfilled,” Chris would tell me. “I’m working with friends.”
Then one day it happened. The numbers caught up with Chris, and he felt an urgent and understandable need to make revenue appear. Since Chris didn’t care for advertising, he refused to pay top dollar for a sales force that would hawk the magazine to the agencies. Money needed to come from somewhere—and that somewhere was the Web. A dramatic increase in traffic would bring the revenue that would close the gap. (We would be relying on programmatic advertising, the algorithmically driven auctions that advertisers use to buy access to desirable demographics cheaply, regardless of the sites where their ads run.) We were suddenly living a microcosm of recent media history in a time-elapsed sequence that collapsed a decade of painful transition into a few tense months. Our digital revolution couldn’t happen quickly enough.
When Chris hired me, he was under no illusions. Despite starting at Slate, I wasn’t what they call a “digital native.” The Web interested me; the hunt for traffic piqued my competitive tendencies. None of this, however, was my passion. Chris, on the other hand, was a founding father of social media. Although he didn’t care to be defined by that fact, he was a fixture at panels on digital media. He not only felt urgency about the necessity of traffic, but knew the tricks to make it happen.
Growing traffic required a new mind-set. Unlike television, the ethos of print journalism shunned the strategic pursuit of audience as a dirty, somewhat corrupting enterprise. Or that pursuit was something best left to the business side, not a concern for writers and editors. The New Republic held an extreme version of this belief. It had been born as an elite magazine—an invention of Progressive Era intellectuals who hoped to elevate the cultural and political standards of the country. Over the decades, it became something close to a cult, catering to the small group that wanted to read insider writing about politics and highbrow meditations on books. This admixture never made for the most robust audience. For most of its long history, the readership of the New Republic couldn’t fill the University of Mississippi’s football stadium. Suddenly, we needed to develop our Web site to reach millions of readers; we needed to ditch our elitism and meet the masses where they lived.
• • •
A LARGER AUDIENCE WAS CLEARLY within reach. That was the lesson that journalism was absorbing. We could even reduce the lesson to a mathematical equation. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed and the William Randolph Hearst of our era, has expressed it this way: R = ζ.* The formula supposedly illustrates how a piece of editorial content could go viral—how it could travel through the social networks to quickly reach a massive audience, as rapidly as smallpox ripped its way across North America. Peretti’s formula, in fact, came from epidemiology. The nod to science was intentional. With experimentation and careful reading of data, science could suggest which pieces had the best shot at achieving virality—and if not virality, then at least a robust audience.
The emerging science of traffic was really a branch of behavioral psychology—people clicked so quickly, they didn’t always fully understand why they gravitated to one piece over another. They were moved by cognitive biases, irrational forces, decisions made in a semiconscious state. So enticing a reader might entail a little manipulation, a little hidden persuasion.
Chris had learned the science of virality from a site called Upworthy. He had supplied money to help launch Upworthy and turn it into an Internet sensation—“the fastest-growing media start-up in memory,” as one of many fawning press stories described it. Upworthy didn’t produce much of anything original. It plucked videos and graphics from across the Web, usually obscure stuff, then gave them headlines that made them appealing to the widest audience. This content was meant to have a progressive sensibility—at the intersection of “awesome” and “meaningful.” Upworthy took the raw material of others and gave it the magical elements that yielded virality.
Magical isn’t the right word. Psychologists had discovered that a state of unquenchable curiosity could be cultivated. Humans are comfortable with ignorance, but they hate feeling deprived of information. Upworthy designed headlines to make readers feel an almost primal hunger for information just outside their grasp. It pioneered a style—which it called the “curiosity gap”—that explicitly teased readers, withholding just enough information to titillate the reader into going further. Classic example: “9 out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” Six million readers couldn’t contain themselves and followed that link. (The mind-blowing fact: income inequality is far worse than most Americans think.)
The headline is, of course, an ancient journalistic art form. But Upworthy—and its legions of imitators—subjected it to positivistic rigor. With every item it posted, Upworthy would write twenty-five different headlines. Software allowed Upworthy to automatically publish all twenty-five, and then determine the most clickable of the bunch. Based on these results, Upworthy uncovered syntactical patterns that were close to sure hits. (Upworthy found tremendous success when it used variations of the sentence “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”) These formulas were so effective that they became commonplace across the Web—so overused that readers grew wise to the tricks and the formulas lost their powers, which led to the frantic scramble to discover the next new thing.
The core insight of Upworthy, BuzzFeed, Vox, and the other emerging Internet behemoths was that editorial success could be engineered—that if you listened to the data, it was possible to craft pieces that would win massive audiences. This was an insight embraced across the industry, even at sober places like the Washington Post. And it was an insight the wormed its way into the New Republic. Chris installed a data guru on our staff to increase our odds of producing viral hits. In weekly meetings, the guru would come armed with topics that we would be wise to pursue. He would keep a careful eye on the topics trending on Facebook, so that we could create content that might ride a wave of popularity. He looked back on historical data to see what the public craved a year ago, so that we could produce pieces in sync with the seasonal interests of readers. “Super Bowl ads are big,” he told us. “What can we create to hit that moment?” Or “Chipotle has run out of pork and it’s all over social. What can we generate?” Questions like these were usually greeted by hostile silence.
While I didn’t care for the tactics, I didn’t strenuously resist them either. Chris still encouraged us to publish long essays and deeply reported pieces. A few schlocky baubles seemed a small price to pay. What’s more, he asked a perfectly reasonable question. Respectable media were going down this path. Did we really think we were better than Time or the Washington Post? They had all adopted a genre that he called “snackable content”—these were charts, lists, videos, quick items that would appeal to the “bored at work crowd,” as the industry termed it, or to the folks killing time on the subway platform. To be sure, the subject could be serious, but the presentation had to be fast and fun, geared to spread via Facebook. Chris was adamant about the necessity of producing this kind of work, because the methods for producing snackable content were so obvious—and, in his view, required little effort. We simply had to mimic the rest of the Internet—write about the same outrage as everyone else, jump on the same topic of the moment. Clicks would rain down upon us if only we could get over ourselves and post the same short clips from The Daily Show as everyone else, framed by an appealing headline and perhaps a conscience-salving paragraph or two of analysis. A Jon Stewart rant was can’t-miss stuff. It was hard to argue with his logic. Everyone else was doing this. They were doing it because it worked. We needed things to work.
• • •
THE NEW REPUBLIC COULDN’T RESIST the historical force remaking our profession, and neither could most other outlets. Silicon Valley has succeeded in bending journalism to its whims, because journalism is weak. Or let’s put it more charitably: Journalism likes to pose as a pillar of the Republic, which it may be, but it’s a newly planted pillar and not so firmly embedded in the soil. American newspapers have existed for 250 years—but the idea that journalists would write the news without partisan bias, in a professional manner, is a newfangled thing, hardly a century old.
Until recently, the narrative of American journalism could be told as a story of triumphant progress. It began in a swamp of partisan bombast, where even stiff-collared papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post were full of invective. (The Post started as a mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, created to hound Rutherford B. Hayes—whom it referred to as “His Fraudulency.”) But partisanship was just a toddler phase for the press. Before newspapers could enter into respectability, they needed to go through an adolescence of sensationalism. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a new generation of press barons (William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer) came to see the massive profits to be made in yellow journalism—overhyped, tawdry stories about crime and gossip, with lavish illustrations and blunt headlines. The sensationalist press generated sizable audiences—a large mass of consumers who could be persuaded to buy the new products rolling out of the factories and sold in urban department stores. “The pull of dollars towards sensationalism helped move newspapers away from the political parties,” the media historian Michael Schudson writes.
Commercialism had a strange, unexpected consequence. Only after newspapers came to depend on the market for survival did journalism self-consciously reject the pressures of the market. Journalism came to insist on its objectivity, to describe its mission as nothing less than the pursuit of Truth. There were sociological reasons for this new high-mindedness. Advertising created an explosion of newspapers—and that swelled the ranks of writers and editors. The employees of newspapers aspired to join the ranks of the respectable professions. Instead of shading the truth and spouting opinions, newspaper writers began to view themselves as “reporters”—faithfully recounting reality. Interviewing was an esoteric practice in the mid-nineteenth century; by World War I, it was an essential part of the job. Advertisers liked the idea of professionalism, too. They preferred to sell their wares next to the least controversial, least alienating copy possible. And though owners might rather have used papers as their own playthings, they came to accept the new way of neutral just-the-facts reporting—which gave their papers (and themselves) a new legitimacy.
The essential text of the era was Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News, which he published in 1920. As an ambitious young editor at the New Republic, Lippmann had supported the Great War, but the public’s response to the conflict horrified him. He never expected the surge of raw, ugly xenophobia that followed Wilson’s call to arms. It was a “reign of terror” fed by a “hurricane of demagogy.” The sheer ignorance of the public horrified him, and he pinned blame on the press. “In an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” Modern life had grown dizzying. Propaganda and distortion stood in the way of the average citizen’s search for truth. Lippmann, an unabashed elitist, saw the reinvention of the press as one of society’s most urgent tasks. Journalism may have been headed toward professionalism, but Lippmann demanded that it step up the pace. He called for the creation of journalism schools, for a new standard of rigor, and above all, for a collective commitment to the ideal of objectivity.
By the time newspapers emerged from World War II, they conveyed a sense of permanence, a marble edifice. It was as if they had always acted with such noble purpose. With this sense of self-importance, there was a dismissiveness toward their paid audience—they were considered almost incidental. Robert Darnton, who wrote for the Times in the sixties, has recalled, “We really wrote for one another. . . . We knew that no one would jump on our stories as quickly as our colleagues; for reporters make the most voracious readers, and they have to win their status anew each day as they expose themselves before their peers in print.” This sense of elitism and purpose helped insulate the American press from pernicious pressures. It made the American newspaper unusually sober. Relative to the rest of the world, the American newspaper proved resistant to corruption and sensationalism. That was a strong belief, but it is now severely tested by pressure emanating from all sides.
At the beginning of the century, the profession was in extremis. A series of recessions prodded media companies to gamble everything on a digital future, a future unencumbered by the clunky, bureaucratic apparatus of publishing on paper. The sense of crisis and opportunity quickly remade the old newsrooms. Over the course of a decade, journalism shed $1.6 billion worth of reporter and editor salaries. At the same time that journalism shriveled, its prestige collapsed. One survey ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America, edging out lumberjack and parole officer. It was an existential crisis that caused the profession to reconsider its very reasons for existing. All those nostrums about independence suddenly seemed like an unaffordable luxury. Generating revenue was a goal that reporters could no longer blithely ignore.
This was a dangerous turn. Journalism had never been a public-spirited enterprise, really. That was just a myth that editors and writers liked to tell themselves. Yet the myth mattered. It pushed journalism to challenge power, made it loath to bend to the whims of its audience; it provided a crucial sense of detachment. That myth is in the process of being shredded.
• • •
ONE OF THE EMBLEMS of the new era hung over my life at the New Republic. It dogged me across my day. Every time I sat down to work, I surreptitiously peeked at it—and I did so as I woke up in the morning, then a few minutes later when I brushed my teeth, and again later in the day as I stood at the urinal. Sometimes I would just stare at the meter’s gyrations, neglecting the piece I was editing or ignoring the person seated across my desk. My viewership was often wishful. I hoped that the meter would unexpectedly surge, an illustration of my genius for picking a winner.
My master was called Chartbeat, a site that provides editors, writers, and their bosses with a real-time accounting of Web traffic, showing the flickering readership of each and every article. The site pretty clearly implied that journalism is a competition, a popularity contest. The site’s needle made us feel as if our magazine were a car, showing us either sputtering up the hill of a poor traffic day or cruising to a satisfying number.
This is the familiar story of the American workplace. Analytics are the managerial revolution of our time. We live in a world of ubiquitous data that provide the basis for ever greater efficiency and productivity, if only we learn from the numbers. This is the reason that Chartbeat and an array of its competitors have taken such hold in virtually every magazine, newspaper, and blog. The point of Chartbeat is that no piece has sufficient traffic—it can always be improved with a bit of tweaking, a better headline, a better approach to social media, a better subject, a better argument. Like a manager standing over the assembly line with a stopwatch, Chartbeat and its ilk have come to hover over the newsroom. The Washington Post (and after I left, the New Republic) installed giant television screens that display traffic stats to the staff. Jonah Peretti boasted, “A lot of what we do at BuzzFeed is give dashboards to every person who works at BuzzFeed where they’re seeing how people are engaging with the content they’re producing: Is it going up? Is it going down?”
This generation of media giants, born on the Internet, has no patience for journalism’s old ethos of detachment. It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post want to be postmodern newspapers. They invest in excellent reporting and have first-rate journalists on their staffs. But these companies don’t try to insulate themselves from the pressures of the market. Their pursuit of audience—winning the popularity contest of the Web—is central to their mission. They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the Web—the never-ending flood of data—to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments.
Take BuzzFeed, which briefly pushed a strategy that it called “no haters.” Negative stories, it concluded, didn’t have a fighting shot at virality. Jonah Peretti put it with characteristic clarity: “If something is a total bummer, people don’t share it. . . . The problem is, after looking at that you feel depressed. . . . It’s almost like you’re sending a bad feeling to your friends so why would you want to send a bad feeling to your friends?” The words of Nick Denton, the evil genius behind Gawker, which was eventually sued into oblivion, are even more clarifying: “Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables. Nor does anyone want to pay to encourage people to eat their vegetables. But, anyway, look at me. I used to cover political reform in post-communist Eastern Europe, which had been my subject at Oxford. And now I tell writers that the numbers (i.e. the audience) won’t support any worthiness. We can’t even write stories about moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Barry Diller unless it involves photographs of them cavorting with young flesh. (I used to enjoy those stories in the old day, before web metrics.)”
It’s a vulgar approach, and a triumphant one. We can see its influence in the way that the New York Times has openly salivated over BuzzFeed’s success. Three years ago, the Times ordered an “Innovation Report”—an internal document that inevitably escaped the confines of the building and found its way to the Internet. The report flayed the paper for failing to vigorously compete on the Web. It was an unusually self-flagellating document, especially because the Times had built a technologically sophisticated site. Yet there were causes for consternation. The Times had entered the Web’s popularity contest, but hardly realized that fact. It hadn’t hitched itself to data and analytics with the same fervor as BuzzFeed, which meant that it really had no clue about mastering the Internet. It produced the odd hits for the Web, but never bothered creating templates to replicate them. Above all, the paper clung to the old ethos of journalism, the one that fended off the business side, that fretted about poisoning the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of profit. “The very first step, however, should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors of choice—‘The Wall’ and ‘Church and State’—which project an enduring need for division,” the authors of the report declared.
The report was right to describe the Times’ conservative values, and we should be thankful for that fact. Though the Times has taken steps in the direction of BuzzFeed, it has resisted revolutionary change and it remains the most excellent paper in the world. But the point isn’t that the descent toward conformity and dreck will happen in a flash. Professional norms, and only professional norms, protect journalism. With sustained hectoring and pressure from above, the norms can be ground to bits. Once they disappear, journalism will be over.
• • •
THE ESSENTIAL TERM of this media era is “trending.” Facebook and Twitter feature it—a list of the subjects in the process of becoming ubiquitous. And the big media organizations have a sophisticated set of analytic tools—a service called CrowdTangle, for example—that alerts them to trending topics at the trailhead of their ascent to popularity. Once a story grabs attention, media mindlessly glom on to it. They write about the topic with repetitive fury, milking the subject for clicks until the public loses interest.
A memorable yet utterly forgettable example: A boastful photo of a Minnesota hunter smiling above the corpse of a lion called Cecil generated more than 3.2 million stories. Every news organization—even the New York Times and the New Yorker—attempted to generate hysteria, so that it could scrape some traffic from it. This required finding some novel angle—or a just-novel-enough angle. Vox: “Eating Chicken Is Morally Worse Than Killing Cecil the Lion.” BuzzFeed: “A Psychic Says She Spoke with Cecil the Lion.” The Atlantic: “From Cecil the Lion to Climate Change: A Perfect Storm of Outrage.” And so on, a deluge of ephemera dissecting the ephemeral.
In some ways, this is just a digitally enhanced version of an old-fashioned media pile-on: an explosion of moralistic furor, thoroughly exploited. But social media amplify the financial incentive to join the herd. Even the littlest magazine has the possibility of achieving virality, of attracting millions of readers, if it can package its stories shrewdly. Higher-brow publications have no guilt about tossing off articles on these trending subjects, so long as they dress them up a bit with a pocket square of academic pretension or a scarf of argumentative cleverness. The results are highly derivative. As in Hollywood, time and money get poured into a formulaic product, a cautious imitation of past successes. Joshua Topolsky, a founder of Vox Media and The Verge, bemoaned this creeping homogenization: “Everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs.”
The problem isn’t just the media’s dependence on Silicon Valley companies. It’s the dependence on Silicon Valley values. Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism. Reporters and their bosses can assert otherwise. They can pretend to rise above the information, to selectively ignore the numbers and continue the relentless pursuit of higher truths and nobler interests. But data is a Pandora’s box. Once journalists come to know what works, which stories yield traffic, they will pursue what works. This is the definition of pandering and it has horrific consequences.
Donald Trump is the culmination of the era. He understood how, more than at any moment in recent history, media need to give the public what it wants, a circus that exploits subconscious tendencies and biases. Even if media disdained Trump’s outrages, they built him up as a character and a plausible candidate. For years, media pumped Trump’s theories about President Obama’s foreign birth into circulation, even though they were built on dunes of crap. It gave endless attention to his initial smears of immigrants, even though media surely understood how those provocations stoked an atmosphere of paranoia and hate. Once Trump became a plausible candidate, media had no choice but to cover him. But media had carried him to that point. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the Gods of Data and benefited the bottom line. Trump began as Cecil the Lion, and then ended up president of the United States.
• • •
THIS PROFUSION OF DATA has changed the character of journalism. It has turned it into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, and calibrated. Perhaps media have always thought this way. But if that impulse always existed, it was at least buffered. Magazines and newspapers used to think of themselves as something coherent—an issue, an edition, an institution. Not as the publisher of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. The audience for journalism may be larger now, but the mind-set is smaller. Thinking about bundling articles into something larger was intellectually liberating. If readers didn’t want a report on child poverty or a dispatch from South Sudan, it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t judge you for that. In fact, they might be flattered that you thought they might like to read such an article, even if they skipped right past it. Editors justified high-minded and quixotic articles as essential for the “mix.”
Now assignments are subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment? This analysis is sometimes explicit and conscious, though often it’s subconscious and embedded in euphemism. It’s the train of thought that leads editors to declare an idea “not worth the effort” or to worry about how an article will “sink.”
Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we’d enter a world where readers couldn’t tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.
The first breach in the barricade is something called “branded content” or “native advertising.” These ads intend to solve the problem of Web advertising—all those banners atop Web pages have become highly ignorable din, ineffective means of branding a firm. Web banner ads physically sit on the fringes of editorial. Branded content is meant to be integrated into the very fabric of a Web site. It is an ad that is written to resemble journalism—a pseudo-piece about the new scientific consensus suggesting better ways to quit smoking in Time, or a sham article on the emerging workforce in the New York Times. Indeed, the ads are usually produced by the media companies themselves, not an ad agency. (The media companies often claim their staff of writers and editors have nothing to do with the copy, though typically it’s their stable of freelancers who do the dirty work.) The wall isn’t fully breached, however. There’s usually a tag indicating that the article has been “sponsored” or “paid for by advertisers.” But it’s as discreet as possible, and that’s the point. Advertisers will pay a premium for branded content, because it stands such a good chance of confusing the reader into clicking.
It seems scandalous that journalistic institutions would create a whole business based on misleading readers. But the scandal runs even deeper. Editorial increasingly resembles advertising. Many Internet publications write about companies and consumer goods with a breathlessness that resembles advertising. This isn’t a coincidence. To sell ads, it helps to create an environment where advertisers feel assured that their message will be heard, or rather mistaken for editorial. BuzzFeed was the reductio ad absurdum of this. Very early in its life, it decided to make branded advertising its chief stream of revenue. To bolster this pursuit, it generated reams of stories that sounded just like press releases. Andrew Sullivan made sport of pointing this out. He ran a feature called “Guess Which BuzzFeed Piece Is an Ad.” It was damn near impossible to detect any difference—“19 Incredible Things You Didn’t Know About Dunkin’ Donuts”; “The New iPhone Keyboard Changes Everything”; “The Only Post You Need to Read About the PlayStation 4.” (Those were all supposedly legitimate works of journalism, not advertising.) How confused was BuzzFeed about the difference between advertising and editorial? When writers published pieces critical of advertisers, BuzzFeed management vanished them from its site. (After public outcry, BuzzFeed conceded its sins and vowed not to repeat them.)
The relationship between advertiser and media is transformed. You can see the change in the language—“sponsor.” Advertisers are no longer simply buying real estate to sell their products; they are acting as sort of beneficent patrons of journalism. Here we can see the stirrings of something far worse. It has become commonplace for journalistic organizations to recruit corporations and foundations as launch sponsors. Advertisers bankroll the debut of new journalistic products. One reason that an advertiser might play this role is perfectly harmless—it’s good exposure. But there’s another, more pernicious reason that they pay—the advertiser gets to play an opaque role in shaping the editorial product.
This was an approach we pursued at the New Republic. Chris Hughes recruited the billionaire activist Tom Steyer to pay hundreds of thousands for a new section of our Web site that would cover how climate change played in congressional elections—even as Steyer spent millions trying to influence those elections to elevate the issue of climate change. Chris also recruited Credit Suisse to pay for a new section of our Web site devoted to the future of banking, just as the bank tried to recover from accusations of tax evasion. The advertisers were trying to buy New Republic editorial to convey exactly their desired message, without readers having any sense of their massive infusions of cash. We shouldn’t soften our description: This sort of arrangement is corrupt.
In the end, my colleagues and I managed to sabotage the worst offenses. Steyer got so frustrated with our editorial staff that he decided to simply buy “sponsored content.” Credit Suisse concluded that it was dangerous to pay a bunch of liberals to cover the future of banking; it ended up sponsoring a month’s worth of articles about identity politics.
Defenders of native advertising have a point: It is hardly Armageddon. Radio announcers used to seamlessly shill for products as they went about reading the news. For decades, the New York Times editorial page included a regular piece of propaganda from Mobil Oil, clearly labeled but embedded among its prestige columnists.
The problem is that the relationship between advertisers and journalism has become so murky. Rules have relaxed, norms have changed. Until recently, the American Society of Magazine Editors was staunchly traditionalist, sternly forbidding journalists to touch ad copy. But in 2015, the guidelines softened. A once shrill condemnation is now a weak suggestion. “Editors should avoid working with and reporting on the same marketer.” We need to understand these changes as dangerous surrenders. Advertisers are buying influence; they are buying the semblance of journalistic legitimacy; they are softening all the rules that bolster the integrity of the profession.
• • •
CHRIS HUGHES AND I ONCE sat at the breakfast table of an august Washington hotel pondering the core qualities of the New Republic—the New Republic that we would re-create together. We didn’t ever say so explicitly, but we were searching for a piece of common ground, for an adjective that could unite everything we both wanted for the magazine. It felt like a roundabout exercise. If there was a whiteboard—and Chris loved whiteboards—it might be filled with discarded terms. But that rubbished verbiage was the futile prelude to a creative breakthrough. “We’re idealistic,” he said. “It ties together our storied past and our optimism about solutions.” “Idealism” was a word that melted my heart, and I felt uncontainable joy at the prospect of agreement. “Boom. That’s it.”
We were idealistic about our shared idealism. Certain goals of ours overlapped. We both wanted the New Republic to thrive; we both believed in an activist vision of American government; we both believed in the importance of elevating the culture toward cosmopolitanism; we both loved the idea of long-form journalism. These similarities were enough for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we shared the same idealism.
Chris’s vision of the world was essentially technocratic; mine was more moralistic and romantic. Where he liked the idea of long-form journalism, I ideologically believed in it. He believed in systems—rules, efficiencies, organizational charts, meetings, productivity tools. The world was eminently improvable, but progress requires escaping from overheated emotions and name-calling and excessive partisanship. This view of the world put him on a collision course with the politically committed intellectual free spirits who populated our office, who wrote with conviction and at odd hours, pursuing the subjects that gave them most satisfaction, not necessarily crowd-pleasing riffs.
Just before it all ended badly, Chris shared his revised vision of the magazine’s future with me, the place to which his idealism had guided him. He had owned the New Republic for two years and he was getting antsy. Results, by which he meant greater Web traffic and greater revenue, needed to come faster. “To save the magazine, we need to change the magazine,” he told me. Engineers and marketers were going to begin playing a central role in the editorial process. They would give our journalism the “cool,” “innovative” features that would make it popular, help it stand out in the marketplace. Of course, this required resources, and those resources would come from the pool that funded long-form journalism. I wasn’t prepared for his plan or his description of the New Republic. “We’re a technology company,” he said. To which I responded, “That doesn’t sound like the type of company that I’m qualified to run.” He assured me that I could do the job.
Two months later I learned from a colleague that Chris had hired my replacement—and my replacement was lunching around New York offering jobs at the New Republic. Before Chris had the chance to fire me, I resigned, and nearly the whole editorial staff of the magazine quit, too. Their idealism dictated that they resist his idealism. They didn’t want to work for a publication whose ethos more clearly aligned with the big tech companies than with journalism. They were willing to pay careful attention to Facebook, but didn’t want their jobs defined by it. The bust-up received its fair share of attention and then faded—a road bump on Silicon Valley’s route to engulfing journalism.