Courtesy of Hanover Square Press
From the earliest pitch, I knew that I wanted to cover the news industry in my book, “Against Convenience.” The book looks at the technology around us and asks whether it’s really improving our lives. Is delivery food worth the higher price? Is streaming music better than collecting CDs or MP3s?
News embodies the paradox of modern convenience: We have access to more information than ever before, but misinformation and partisanship are rampant and the purveyors of reliable information are struggling to stay solvent.
Plus, I figured if I was going to criticize other fields — tech, entertainment, appliance manufacturing — I couldn’t avoid my own. I don’t know how interested the average nonjournalist is in the day-to-day operations of the news business, so I tried to look in the mirror more than gaze at my navel. I wanted to offer some ideas about why we, as an audience, see the news that we do — or why we don’t see the news we might need.
I looked back on my career, talked to a few experts, and read any academic paper I could get my hands on. The news, like the state of the news business, wasn’t great. But I ended up feeling a little more hopeful than I did before I began.
The main idea of the book is that we don’t have to give up every high-tech convenience, but we should make sure our technology is working for us, rather than pushing us to settle for something that’s a little easier, but no better.
Here are a few conclusions I reached as I researched and wrote.
1. Publishers made a lot of bad decisions.
The first text I turned to was Richard J. Tofel’s essay “Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future.” I read it as a Kindle Single (remember those?) when it was new, and it’s stayed in my mind for years.
Tofel writes that “the newspaper business was led — led itself — into fundamental error, the error of giving away its content, what some have termed the ‘original sin’ of digital publishing.” Publishers, he argues, chased what was “hip,” which was to follow Stewart Brand’s axiom, “information wants to be free,” while ignoring Brand’s following line, “information also wants to be expensive.”
Price made online news convenient. In the early years of the web, it wasn’t exactly easy or fast to get online, and not every article was posted to a paper’s site. You could get a fuller view of the news by subscribing to home delivery or going to the nearest newspaper vending machine. But the website was free.
The tradeoff here is one that’s common with web-based conveniences. It seems free, but you’re still paying for a device and for data, and none of that money is going to news publishers. Something similar happened with photography (Apple is the world’s top camera company and it doesn’t make a standalone camera) and music (Napster made music free for anyone who could buy a computer and a fast enough connection to download songs, and artists lost out on sales).
I called Tofel to talk about his essay as I was reporting the book. I asked if paywalls might’ve worked in the early years of digital news. It’s impossible to know for sure, but he told me that it’s likely major publishers would’ve been better prepared to weather future disruptions had they not weakened themselves by giving away news.
2. Data doesn’t say what it seems to.
Giving away news in the beginning wasn’t the only mistake publishers made, or the only time they hurt themselves chasing trends. In the book, I recall an editorial meeting I was in where I pitched a story about a sheep that got loose for months and, when it was found, had to be shorn of many pounds of wool. An editor shot it down by saying, “Hoofed animals don’t do well for us.”
This made sense in its own odd way. Audiences had moved to social media for news, and we wanted to fit into their convenient consumption habits. In the newsroom where I pitched the story, a close reading of our analytics revealed that, of all the stories about animals, horses were the only ungulates that attracted enough clicks on Facebook to meet our page view goals.
Unravel this and you see the arbitrariness of a lot of digital data. It’s precise, but it isn’t always insightful. To begin, the more favorable clickthroughs for horses might have been because of the algorithm favoring horses instead of the audience not liking sheep. And what does a page view tell us? It suggests that a number of people saw an ad, but it doesn’t measure interest or attention or loyalty. Other metrics offer more specific information, but are still flawed. Time on page is often an average that balances dedicated readers against aimless scrollers.
In newsrooms where I’ve worked, we’ve tried all manner of formulas to measure success, and we’ve always come up short. The best use of data was to sell ads based on a metric, but that led to trying to achieve those goals, which weren’t always in line with informing an audience. We know more about what people do online, but less about what matters.
The data is more voluminous than what we had before, but when revenue and editorial are shaped around it, it’s not an improvement over the earlier system of ratings books, newsstand sales, or subscriber numbers.
Looking back on my days as a full-time digital editor, I remembered the many publishers that were heralded as examples of smart use of data — the sites whose editors spoke at conferences and whose logos were in a million aspirational slide decks. Many of these sites are now shells of their former selves, if they still exist at all.
3. Original reporting was an early casualty of platform-driven news.
A lot of what I see in my feed looks like news, but it isn’t actual reporting. Flip through cable news and you’ll see a lot of heated debate and punditry, typically focused on whatever big story led that day’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or similar. Go on social media and you’ll see a lot of debate about the debate. More and more takes are piled on less and less original reporting.
Social media made this worse, and it made punditry more profitable (especially with algorithms that favor controversy over novelty). But this trend started earlier. Before algorithms had newsrooms ignoring stories about sheep, publishers began writing to a different platform: search engines. In an interview on “The Press Box Podcast” this summer, Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci explained how Google was instrumental in the shift to analysis over fresh reporting:
“Google told not only the audience but also the journalist that the way to make the magazine was to see what was already trending and write to that. So people would come to the office … and they would write through their lens — the point of view, the voice of that publication — whatever was already in the news. And the idea of original reporting, picking up the phone, talking to people … that became like a lost art.”
The time, effort, staff, and other resources that a publisher could put toward finding something new increasingly go to analysis. It’s easier than ever for the audience to get information, but the information has been filtered through a few different viewpoints and infused with speculation by the time it gets to a reader or viewer.
4. Friction can be technological or social. Both matter.
It’s not just publishers and journalistic outlets that pivoted toward punditry. Hot takes and interpretations of the news are popular on social media and other channels.
This has made it far easier to consume opinions all day. Watching an hourslong Twitch stream, stacking up political podcasts, and tuning in to news influencers in every moment of boredom are ways that millions of people try to stay informed.
Taking in so much punditry used to be a little embarrassing. In the early 2000s, people would joke that their conservative parents or grandparents watched so much Fox News, the logo was burned into their TV screens. A person was considered a rabid Rush Limbaugh listener if they tuned in to all three hours of his show each weekday. And even if someone did have such an opinion-heavy news diet, there were social risks to sharing what they heard with co-workers, relatives, friends, or anyone else in their local social circle.
Now, anyone can follow partisan media for their entire workday in AirPods without anyone knowing. And it’s easy to find sympathetic peers in the comments section. If someone disagrees, they’re a stranger you can argue with anonymously, without fear of them ever knowing who you are.
There’s no need to shame people for liking their favorite programs, but there’s a reason “touch grass” is a catchphrase in modern life — it’s what you tell someone if they spend too much time with another neologism, “doomscrolling.” The friction of limitation that used to stop someone from stewing in partisan media all day is gone, but social friction can still remain — friendly reminders that politics isn’t entertainment and there’s more to find online.
5. The loss of arts criticism is notable now.
News sites and accounts may be full of opinions on news, but the considered contemplation of arts has nearly vanished. Many papers (dailies and especially alternative weeklies) once had movie, TV, and music critics, as well as plenty of freelancers. Publishers were quick to cut these jobs when money got tight.
“If you are counting full-time critic jobs at newspapers, you may as well count tombstones,” Syracuse University’s Johanna Keller told Nieman Reports in 2013, noting how many arts writing jobs had been eliminated (a quote I reference in the book as well).
The loss here is often overlooked in the story of the decline of the news industry. You can find arts news and reviews today, but it’s often in the form of anonymous critiques posted to social media or aggregator sites — or it’s on specialty podcasts. Written reviews by dedicated professionals are harder to come by. And this work is necessary. On the local level, coverage like this can help support a local arts scene and remind audiences of the options available in their community. On the national level, we’re overwhelmed with abundance through streaming apps, where algorithms have replaced human beings as the source of recommendations.
You can understand an editor opting to keep an eye on city hall instead of the local theater. But arts are a part of life. I often think of something a boss of mine said when I ran through all the stories my team of reporters had in the works — all of which were about politicians, business, and schools: “Isn’t there a reason people live in this city?”
There are plenty of professionals who opine on politics or “hard” news, but few who talk about the things that bring joy to our lives. Criticism and arts coverage are a way to remind an audience that there’s more to think about than politics.
6. Local connections have been lost.
It’s time for me to vote in my home state, and I don’t know who my local candidates are. I do, however, know who is running for the Senate in Michigan, Texas, and Maine — elections I can’t vote in, in states where I have no concept of the on-the-ground issues that might determine how someone votes.
A person who listens to news all day might never hear about what’s happening in their own town. This is another casualty of convenience. As local news outlets crumbled, audiences turned to nationally focused outlets online.
National news previously passed through local infrastructure like the hometown paper that ran wire copy or affiliate TV and radio stations. With all of these, some local news was likely to seep through, even in the form of a promo for a local newscast during the network news. You may get some local ads on streaming services, YouTube, in podcasts, or on websites now, but passive exposure to headlines from your community isn’t as assured.
7. The audience to reach is not the one that hates you.
It happens to a lot of journalists. They publish a story and a few partisans comment that it’s biased, and this is why they don’t read that publication anymore. An editor sees it and thinks maybe the commenters have a point. Maybe this news outlet could do a bit more to reach the disaffected and frustrated. Soon enough, the reporter is scrounging around diners in rural America seeking perspective, or maybe paying penance for perceived elitism.
If this strategy worked, we might have seen some evidence of improvement, either in ratings or in political behavior. But it doesn’t work, and we don’t see evidence of it. Still, it’s tempting to chase this audience, to try to win over minds that have long been made up.
When I talked to the psychologist Sacha Altay about false news and the path of radicalization, he made the point that most people don’t break their brains on false news or conspiracy theories, even though it’s so easy to do. Instead, they go online for distraction and fun. This is the audience to reach, he says.
Reaching these people isn’t easy, because they’re typically silent. They don’t show up in metrics or in comments because they either don’t see your stories or they scroll right past them. Reaching them is hard. But it’s not nearly as hard as convincing someone to reverse their entire worldview and give you $5 a month.
