The real story of media accountability is how the tracking ability of internet advertising is re-shaping the editorial decision-making of the mainstream media.
There has been a lot written on this site about media accountability. Bloggers like to think that they are digital sheepdogs, riding herd on a mangy collection of baaing media numbskulls. Indeed, the internet has developed as an essential fact-checking service, a way for bad journalism to be often instantly exposed. Journalists tend to be generalists, and when the publish, they run the risk that all generalists run, that a specialist will come out of the woodwork and show the sloppiness of their work. So all hail the blogmob, for all its extreme dynamics and hyper-critical excess, if it keeps the good boys and girls at the majors a bit more honest. Anyone reading this site in the run-up to the Iraq war saw what a good vetting was like. Too bad we hadn't reached a tipping point where it mattered, in that particular case.
But there is another way in which the internet is making an honest gal out of mainstream media, and that breaks down to dollars and cents, advertising dollars and cents, the very heart's blood of the media. The dirty little secret of print and television advertising was always that no one really knew how well it worked. You ran an ad, and maybe you saw a bump in sales. Then you postulated the "value" that you received from the ad. Actually, the most accurate print advertising was always the yellow pages: you ran the ads and watched your phone ring, or not. Advertising before the dawn of the internet was an arrow in the dark, a blunt tool at audience activation, a shotgun spray of branding.
The internet has revolutionized this, with consequences to both the corporate media business model and the editorial content. I've worked as a net ad buyer, and when purchasing ads on the net, everything is trackable. If I place a banner ad on, say, the front page of www.nytimes.com, I can tell how many people saw this ad, how many of them clicked on it, how many of them purchased what I was selling after clicking on it, what they bought, and what other web sites they visited. I can know exactly whether my ad makes me money. This has been disastrously disruptive for journalism.
For the first time, what matters is not the "reputation" of the paper, but the addition of the machine. Pure brand building is rare on the net; advertising is targeted to a precise manner. Buyers now have a real value they can place on an ad, and will not spend more then that value, and guess what? That value is far lower then was thought in the old days of print. Look at the overhead of Dailykos versus the overhead of the web division of the New York Times. The value of an ad on Daily Kos vs. The New York Times is entirely a matter of eyeballs, not of prestige. It really is a level playing field, and such a field is always going to favor the nimble orgs that can maximize the salary to eyeball ratio. Out of this newer, leaner budget comes the modern pared-down newsroom.
But there may be an even greater effect. Editors are also now able to follow what their readers are doing on their web pages. How long are they on the home page? What sections are read the most? What stories drive the most traffic, and allow us to make the most money?
In the old days, you assembled a front page of a newspaper based on the agenda of what you thought would sell, yeah, but also on what you thought was important yourself, what stories mattered according to your ethics, your politics, your bias. More and more the front page decisions are driven by this new data of what people will read. This creates a feedback loop between consumer and editor, a loop that has developed its own dynamic. Probably the greatest effect of this loop has been to drive narrative-driven pieces to the front, stories with archetypes, villains and heroes, the tragedy of the fall and the emotional resonance of redemption.
In other words, articles that more and more resemble the drama and personality of gossip.
Our profit-driven mainstream media outlets will continue to be shaped increasingly by the trail of the mouse, the data blast of consumer preference. Look at the L.A. Times, as it is reduced from a great national newspaper to a gossipy local with a fraction of its current staff. Latimes.com is by any measure a very popular web site. But it is one that cannot support the infrastructure of print reporting, and thus increasingly searches for profits in entertainment stories and other high-fat journalism. It will become harder and harder for profit-driven corporate media to resist the siren call of high click-thru rate stories.
So how do we keep the baby of good, long-form investigative reporting, from being thrown out with the bathwater of ruthless internet ad dollar efficiency? That is something to consider for another diary. Any suggestions?