I’ve signed up for the trial version of David Corn’s newsletter, and am planning to become a full subscriber. His latest covers “A Denizen of the Economic Establishment Admits the Elite’s Big Mistakes”.
Alice Rivlin was a pioneer. Director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1975 to 1983 and head of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, she was the first woman in both posts. In the late 1990s, she was vice-chair of the Federal Reserve. When not in government service, she was high-profile Democratic policy wonk, think-tanking on budget and economic issues from a perch at the Brookings Institution and long associated with deficit hawks who decried what they called irresponsible government spending. (She was a supporter of spending that could be considered investments.) She died three years ago, leaving a final book unfinished. It was to be a volume warning that partisan warfare, political standoffs, and congressional gridlock posed a direct threat to the welfare and happiness of the American people.
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Corn discusses the insights in the book, including three big mistakes the establishment made, and wonders how a book written before the insurrection could apply to the situation as it is now.
Divided We Fall: Why Consensus Matters, published this week, comes with two endorsements on the cover, one from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the other from conservative writer Bill Kristol—a testament to her desire for bipartisan and ideological compromise...
The Watch, Read, and Listen List is where Corn discusses:
Topdog/Underdog. In 2018, the New York Times placed Topdog/Underdog in the No. 1. slot on its list of the 25 best American plays of the previous quarter-century. The Pulitzer Prize-winning work by Suzan-Lori Parks, which opened at the Public Theater in 2001 and starred Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle, immediately entered the pantheon of Great American Plays...
Corn includes links to earlier newsletters at the bottom, for the “ICYMI” crowd.
What I found of interest is what Corn starts with:
— efforts to get the word out about his latest book: American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.
(Here’s a write-up I did of the article at Mother Jones where Corn talks about how he came to write the book, and has a capsule version of some of his reporting.)
Corn relates how his book is doing, some of the exposure it’s been getting, but also how difficult it is to get the word out. That’s where it gets interesting. He talks about how he used to be able to reach thousands of people on Facebook — but then Facebook changed its algorithms. As Corn tells it:
...There was one platform I had hoped to use to sell the book: Facebook. But it failed me—and for some interesting reasons. The basics: I have two Facebook pages. A personal page has about 800 friends; a fan page has over 63,000 followers. I used to diligently employ both to promote my journalistic work. And I had great success with that. An article posted on my fan page would typically reach between 10,000 and 150,000 readers, occasionally even more. Then a few years ago, Facebook changed its algorithms to de-emphasize news content—more gossip from friends and more pet pictures!—and this distribution channel shriveled. A recent example: a scoop I had about J.D. Vance that drew much attention on Twitter and elsewhere generated a measly 376 impressions on my Facebook fan page. Posts on that page about my book have received between 500 and 1,300 impressions—meaning Facebook’s algorithm was sharing these posts with only a small number of the people who had signed up to follow my work. A natural audience was being dramatically shortchanged.
Facebook offered to boost Corn’s posts — for a fee. After he had been ‘verified’ — because his posts have ‘political content’. Which he applied for — and is still waiting to be approved.
You may have heard conservatives foaming at the mouth over the way they are being ‘censored’ by these tech companies. Well…
At this point, I should note that two years ago Mother Jones discovered that when Facebook changed its algorithm to emphasize personal news over news news, this shift favored conservative outlets over progressive ones. A slide presentation for Facebook execs explicitly stated that Mother Jones would suffer, while the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s right-wing media operation], would benefit. When you hear conservatives whining about Big Tech’s supposedly stifling the right, know that this is BS.
What’s an author to do?
It's tough to determine if Facebook’s revised algorithm slammed me more than other journalists and writers. Zuck’s monster does not make its secret sauce transparent. But when I was bemoaning the uselessness of Facebook for hawking American Psychosis, a colleague suggested I conduct an experiment. Following her advice, I posted a photograph of my dog Moxie “reading” a copy of the book on our porch. (The picture came from MoxieCam™, a feature included in the premium version of this newsletter.) This was the post’s caption: “Moxie, the smartest and cutest dog around, sure knows how to spend a Saturday morning. Check out what just arrived for her.” You will note there was no mention of the book and no reference to its title. So no “American” or “Republican” to trigger the algorithm. And “cutest dog” and “Saturday morning,” I thought, might tickle said algorithm.
Did it work?
It worked. This post scored 10,676 impressions. That’s more than 10 times the average number of impressions for previous posts related to the book. That led to over 1,000 likes and scores of shares and comments—far more than the usual handful. Of course, the post had no link to Amazon or any other bookseller for the book. But it did reach a much larger audience than informational posts about the book.
The lesson: if you want to sell a book on Facebook, get a dog. Well, maybe. I suppose I could next do a post with Moxie holding up a sign that proclaims “Buy this book!” and displays an easy-to-remember website address—and accompany it with a caption that includes the words “beautiful puppy.”
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So, there you have it — one way to get around those pesky algorithms.
Give David Corn a look (Free Trial here, description here, subscribe here) and maybe give Mother Jones some love as well.
A few more thoughts:
Remember when the Internet was going to bring about the Golden Age with information available on everything for everyone? Kind of like earlier when cable news promised “Give us 15 minutes and we’ll give you the world.” IIRC, the dystopian movie RoboCop showed us a future where that had been reduced to “Give us 5 minutes and we’ll give you the world.”
With so much information everywhere, the problem is no one has the bandwidth or the attention span to keep up. There’s also Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. Corn notes that there just aren’t as many newspapers out there as there used to be, which means fewer places to see book reviews — and fewer people who actually still read dead-tree media.
I believe it was Atrios who long ago said (or quoted someone) “Information wants to be free — but the rent wants to be paid.” There’s good writing out there — but increasingly you have to find it and pay for it one writer at a time.
With the fractionation/balkanization of news media these days, it’s harder than ever to avoid getting stuck in a self-selected bubble, and harder than ever for people to get a broad consensus on what actually is ‘real’ news with ‘actual’ facts.
In some ways, the days when there just three commercial networks and PBS to tell us what the ‘important’ national news was, and local newspapers to tell what the ‘important’ local news was — well things were a lot simpler. Of course what we weren't being told was also a big story — and still is — but there was a sharper boundary between what was CT and what wasn’t.
Then too, when the TV networks decided to treat news like sports entertainment (Thanks Roone Arledge) journalism got pushed up even harder against the need to generate revenue as a primary focus. I can remember when morning news shows actually had straight-up news reporting before diving in to chatty feel-good human interest stuff, oddities, and celebrity news.
The line between news shows and talk shows has blurred. It’s always been a battle to win eyeballs — but the need for people to have good information (despite themselves) is greater than ever. One of the best books I’ve read on the battle to report what people need to know while also managing to pay the rent is the classic Terry Pratchett book “The Truth”.
FWIW (and when did we start using things like that instead of full words, LOL) I understand Facebook may be going into a death spiral. (And when did Facebook become “that thing that Old People use?”) I find it amusing my Facebook feed is starting to manifest ads for “Tribel” which pitches itself as a Facebook alternative for liberals/progressives or something like that. What’s that like?
Alvin Toffler was on to something. And so was John Brunner.
