Risks abound as reporters play in traffic
Pay-for-click model creates a new world for journalism
It is a dirty secret of the journalism profession that many reporters are bad at math. Many of us ended up typing our way to a living because we had an easier time making words dance than numbers.
But now that everything can be measured, we have to keep an eye on both. Journalists who were paid to write when the muse or events beckoned are now held accountable for the amount of work they produce and the volume of traffic it attracts.
Gee, it’s almost like news is supposed to be a business or something.
The availability of ready metrics on content is not only changing the way news organizations compensate their employees, but will have a significant effect on the news itself.
If I were being paid by the click for this column, I might have begun it this way: Will an oppressive emphasis on “click bait” mean that the news ends up imprisoned by transgender models posing in disgraceful listicles accompanied by kidnapped nude kittens?
But I’m not. So let’s just say there is a growing trend in many corners of journalism to tie the compensation of journalists to the amount of web traffic and/or articles they generate.
At the beginning of the month, TheStreet.com, a site that covers the stock market, announced it was expanding its platform to include new voices, and that contributors would be paid by the click. A contributor who receives 60,000 page views in a week, for example, would be paid $50. (A lot of mischief can occur when stock prices are being written about, but we’ll get back to that later.)
At the end of February, The Daily Caller, a conservative political site run by Tucker Carlson, said it would begin a hybrid arrangement in which staff writers were paid a base salary plus a traffic incentive. The Daily Caller’s publisher told The Washington Post that the new plan would lead to more traffic and higher overall compensation for writers.
Joel Johnson, editorial director of Gawker Media, announced a program in February called “Recruits” that creates subsidiary sites for new contributors, attached to existing editorial sites like Gawker or Jezebel. The recruits receive a stipend of $1,500 a month, and they pay back that amount at a rate of $5 for every 1,000 unique visitors they attract. They then get to keep anything above the amount of the stipend, up to $6,000.
At the end of 90 days, the contributors are evaluated and retained or cut loose based on their traffic performance. (Gawker has long been a pioneer in traffic transparency and giving its writers bonuses based on traction in the marketplace.)
Depending on your perspective, the trend could be a long overdue embrace of the realities of the publishing landscape or one more step down the road to perdition. Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, is bullish on the effect of new pay paradigms.
“The journalist will do extremely well in the next 10 years. It will be a booming profession,” he said, adding that he agreed with a recent suggestion by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that “news will be 10 times the size it was.”
Others worry that compensation built on metrics will leave working journalists on the short end of the stick.
“It is very early days of pay-for-click for professional writers,” said Minda Zetlin, president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and a columnist for Inc.’s website. “In terms of it being a bonanza for writers, that is far from true right now, but there will be value in learning best practices and where our traffic comes from.”
It’s not just digital upstarts that are starting to manage reporters by the numbers. The Portland, Ore., newspaper The Oregonian, the much heralded home of many Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, is in the midst of a reorganization driven by the desire for more web traffic, according to internal documents obtained by Willamette Week, a weekly newspaper in Portland. A year after big layoffs and a reduction in home delivery to four times a week, The Oregonian, owned by Newhouse’s Advance Publications, is focusing on digital journalism — and the people who produce it — with a great deal of specificity.
Beginning immediately, according to the documents, the company’s leadership will require reporters to post new articles three times a day and to post the first comment under any significant article. It’s part of a companywide initiative to increase page views by 27.7 per cent in the coming year. Beyond that, reporters are expected to increase their average number of daily posts by 25 per cent by the middle of the year and an additional 15 per cent in the second half of the year.
If that sounds like it won’t leave much time for serious work, the new initiative also calls for reporters to “produce top-flight journalistic and digitally oriented enterprise as measured by two major projects a quarter,” which will include “goals by projects on page views and engagement.” In the more-with-less annals of corporate mandates, this one is a doozy. Contacted by email, Peter Bhatia, who is departing as editor of The Oregonian, scheduled an interview, but then declined to comment.
The emphasis on page views and productivity in both old media and new is turning heads among people who study the news business, including Nikki Usher, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s school of media and public affairs.
“Reporters have always been incentivized for doing big, popular news in terms of internal recognition, but I think it is revolutionary for traditional news organizations to follow the dictates of traffic,” she said. “On some level, they are coming clean, owning up to the fundamental realities that there are going to be significant changes to the business model.”
For people who grew up in a digital news environment, the emphasis on traffic is not very much of a shock.
“Historically, writers never got to participate in the success if they came up with something that is truly viral, so it sort of makes sense that they might end up getting paid more for something that is massively successful,” said Choire Sicha, founder of The Awl, a website focused on culture and current events. The Awl doesn’t pay by the click but does occasionally pay a bonus for a big win by a writer, as it did for a recent popular post about life on the other side of the coffee shop counter.
And journalism’s status as a profession is up for grabs. A viral hit is no longer defined by the credentials of an individual or organization. The media ecosystem is increasingly a pro-am affair, where the wisdom — or prurient interest — of the crowd decides what is important and worthy of sharing.
Gawker Media now hosts Kinja, a platform where anybody can publish a blog post. The leaderboard on Kinja is a mix of people who write for a living and people who wrote something about living that connected with other people.
It’s bracingly meritocratic, but there are hazards. Quizzes are everywhere right now because readers can’t resist clicking on them, but on an informational level, they are mostly empty calories. There are any number of gambits to induce clicks, from LOL cats to slide shows to bait-andswitch headlines.
But more than just traffic can be manipulated once you open up the gates, as Fortune recently pointed out. Authors promoting specific stocks posted to sites — including Forbes.com, Seeking Alpha, and Wall St. Cheat Sheet — without disclosing that they were paid to promote the companies they were writing about. The stocks were pumped and sometimes dumped without the reader being any the wiser.
Now that metrics are part of the news agenda, all of the sticks are in the air. Just because something is popular does not make it worthy, but ignoring audience engagement is a sure route to irrelevance.