If you follow as many journalists as I do on Twitter, perhaps your timeline blew up last week, too, with links to Paul Carr’s piece on TechCrunch asking Now Can We All Agree That The “High Quality Web Content” Experiment Has Failed?
Slate’s decision to lay off media critic Jack Shafer, among other staffers, prompted Carr’s essay, which asked “what better illustration could there be of online media’s woes than an ezine laying off its media critic because the economics of web content don’t support a writer of his stature and specialism?”
As you might guess, I’m going to answer “no” to Carr’s headline question. Let’s not conflate the economics of Slate with the “economics of web content.” Carr lost me completely when he wrote of Slate’s “minuscule staff of 60.”
Sixty’s a gargantuan staff for a Web-only publication – one that could be supported only by a global publication with a worldwide advertiser base. Don’t blame the Web for Slate’s decision to operate with a too-large staff for the advertiser base its audience would support. That’s Slate’s bad call. (Blame Slate, too, for turning off the audience it could have had. I – and many others, I suspect – gave up long ago on Slate’s smug brand of neo-liberal contrarianism, honed under the direction of former editor Jacob Weisberg.)
This has become standard repertoire on OJR, but plenty of people are making plenty of money with Web content. And millions of readers are enjoying rich conversations online, featuring voices of individuals whose experiences too often were not heard or told by newsrooms of Slate’s size and larger.
True, it’s hard to find examples of Slate-sized newsrooms producing general interest publications that are making 1980s-newspaper profits online. Carr’s correct to link to an explanation that niche-topic websites are doing better financially today than general-interest news websites.
But, so what? What makes a general-interest publication like Slate inherently of higher quality than a niche publication? And what makes a story reported and written in a traditional journalism format inherently of higher quality than other forms of storytelling online?
Nothing.
The knock on niche media has been that it isolates readers in “silos” where they aren’t exposed to news from other beats and perspectives. But most people, I believe, remain interested in their communities and their roles as citizens within them. Social media’s also giving readers access to many more diverse sources of information than have been available in traditional news publications.
The mass market always was a myth. People always wanted to read and watch content that matched their interest. Mass market publications succeeded when people had few or no other choices. Give people those choices, and people take them.
When readers find information that they find informative and instructive, and they will pay attention to it. So don’t blame readers for ignoring boring “public interest” reporting that simply rehashes “he said, she said” quotes with little or no rigorous analysis of what those sources are saying and doing. If your publication, like Slate, is not attracting enough readers to support the reporting you want to present, don’t blame the readers. Or the Internet. Look at yourself, then try to find smarter ways to make your reporting more informative, more instructive and more engaging.
More contrarian won’t cut it.
As for “high quality”? I measure that by how truthful information is, and by how well it engages and instructs its audience – not by a URL’s adherence to a j-school-approved and time-tested format. Online, more and more reporting is emanating from conversations, in discussions, blogs and social media than from old-fashioned reporter-makes-a-phone-call newswriting. That changes the process – and economics – of news reporting online. Don’t give up on for-profit Web publishing just because one model for how to handle the news isn’t producing enough cash to support the huge staff it requires.
If a publisher really wants to produce economically successful author-driven narratives, then there’s a better medium than the Web for doing that anyway.
There’s still huge demand for news and analysis out there. And the Internet’s providing new channels through which to meet that demand. So don’t blame the audience, or blame the Internet, whenever a particular business fails to make enough money by putting audiences and customers together through those channels.
Put the blame where it belongs, instead – with that business’s management.
About Robert Niles
