I wonder a lot about news websites being chock full of sludge ads. Because I think we assume the process went like this:
- Print/TV news org is doing fine financially in the 90s
- In the late 2000s, print begins to decline and consumers demand online access, which they won't pay for
- News org adds awful ads everywhere to get by
- They begin making their material worse and worse as they learn what kind of pandering gets people to click; It's no longer an option to make good news, because content is less important than being eye catching
But I have always wondered if the reality is far more banal and less human:
- Print/TV news org is doing fine financially in the 90s
- People in charge learn about web ads; decide to make a website solely so they can get extra free money for content they were already making
- This succeeds, so they immediately begin trying to find ways to create bait (content) for less, since the actual product is now the viewers, not the news
This is part of my overarching theory that if something is free, it will be popular simply because there is no opportunity cost, and this is what drives an awful lot of terrible decisions at businesses - they will do anything if it's free, and it doesn't matter if it's a good idea; but if that thing costs any non-negligible amount they won't even consider it.
My favorite example is mail merges - your bank would not send you a physical piece of mail every single week telling you about some minor account feature, It would be absurd, but they'll do it via email because it's quote unquote free.
And if someone had to hand-print every single advertisement, they wouldn't send you credit card offers at all. It's not that they would budget less for those things, or do them at longer intervals, they just wouldn't do them at all if there was any associated cost whatever.
The invention of the mail merge and of mass printing and mass mailing created the business "need" to do these things. They're not intrinsic, obvious practices, and I imagine for every 50,000 emails, they get maybe one curious sniff, and fewer bites. But it's "free", so why not irritate their entire customer base despite the strategy being incredibly ineffective?
This shit was invented opportunistically, and that's why every time a new technology appears, my first thought is "what obnoxious idea will this put in the brains of businessmen that they never would have had otherwise?"
and i stumble across this again, which reminded me of something.
there's a very important share of this post that talks about how the industry works, I'm on phone so not going to go looking for it. it doesn't contradict this point, though.
and I'm aware @cathoderaydude talked about this but I think it might help to use the lens I've been seeing the newspaper collapse through, as someone who reads the news.
sometime, around the dotcom inflection point for print, and the dawn of fox news 24 hour coverage in the 90s for TV, the news companies realized that most people who read the more accessible news are no longer just the highly educated, and started moving language from educated higher class stereotypes of what context people might have, to things a broader audience could access. advertisers almost certainly played a role here.
this is not a bad thing. In a vacuum.
but, well. why did journalists assume everyone would understand them? journalism school. why did they write at a university level? journalism school. where did they get their writing voice from? that's right, journalism school.
so, to compete, they ended up hiring writers with less and less good credentials in terms of like, understanding the responsibility of journalism, and the schools probably lowered journalistic standards to stay relevant. this is also why you see the rise of opinion editorials being the main driver of any given news website -- without the need to distribute physical newspapers, your opinions column now can be infinite pages, and, well, they write to our audience better than our guys.
and in recent years in print and about 2009 for TV (LIKELY BECAUSE OF STEWART AND COLBERT'S SUCCESS OH MY GOD), I think we have this shift to:
- actual high quality narrow focus journalism
- done by formally trained journalists
- to, in their eyes, hook the business class and intelligentsia
interleaved with opinion to cover the broader topics:
- bread and butter politics
- local news (because too expensive to dedicate your journalistic corps to fit a local audience unless it's a big city)
- "culture war" issues
- mundane international news
such that one launders the other.
see also, msmbc, cnn, fox having opinion piece majority, interleaved with actual journalism, to munge the two's strengths.
the thing is these aren't "many different failures culminating in one big one" like the systems thinking people would say.
no, we need to ntsb the fall of journalism.
the root cause is capitalism, folks. the incentives, but especially the brutal pressures of money being needed to live, affecting everywhere in the chain means this ripples. from the advertisers making audience size a matter of life and death to the schools cutting back on ethical standards because they need enough of a reputation to remain both competitive and justify their existence as program.
why do most people in companies lie in ways that cost the company way more than a salary? the person couldn't risk saying no or they'd be unable to make rent
edit: ok this is very funny, I thought it was a separate post from the mail merge one and i had just been scrolling too fast
