The Newsroom
This is an excerpt from my book, The Burned-Out Blogger’s Guide to PR.
Conventional wisdom dictates that reporters are driven to sensationalize, libel, and otherwise exploit the excitement pumps in readers’ brains because of our insatiable thirst for page views. Page views generate revenue for Mother Blog, which in turn lead to bonuses, praise, and career advancement. And so we have this relentless, cynical race to cover anything and everything that can be passed off as “news”, where nuance and accuracy are regularly trampled.
Many reporters would agree with this assessment. Yet we are just as likely to feel as if we are an inconsequential part of the problem, because we know how rarely we’re actually thinking about maximizing traffic. The honest truth is that in our heart of hearts we want to write stories that have the most importance, the most impact — for which page views are merely a proxy.
And somewhere deep in our minds, The Devil (as voiced by James Earl Jones) cackles with glee.
The problem with the Page Views narrative is that it gives reporters too much credit. We are too busy trying to get the story looking decent enough to hit Publish to have time to consider why we’re choosing one headline over another. It’s just that certain stories and phrases feel right; our fingers are guided by forces subtle and mysterious, the sort that bypass and manipulate logic by harnessing the potent powers of emotion.
That’s where the booze of validation comes in — that craving for the serotonin spikes of comments and Likes and views — and indeed, it accounts for many a sensationalized and poorly-considered post. But these boozy impulses are short-term. It is only over extended exposure to them and the culture they foster that our judgement suffers long-term damage: a cirrhosis of the conscience, if you will.
The crucible for these issues is the newsroom.
The best thing about the newsroom is that it is a fantastic cure for loneliness. Because while its previous incarnations were restricted to the confines of a physical office, the modern newsroom is available on iOS, Android, and the web. It is with us at all times, our thumbs trained to whisk us there when we feel bored or alone or we think too hard about how the news cycle feels like a hamster wheel, how even our successes are forgotten in a matter of hours.
But back inside the newsroom we are relieved to remember that we are part of a team, a powerful team capable of toppling Power. Of chasing Truth. And of wickedly clever banter. What fun we have, our running commentary of the day’s news and idiots and gaffes. It can be brutal, sure — nothing like having your boss slam your post in front of the entire company — but we’re part of something, in a way that satisfies our base human desire for belonging.
And it was a bad post.
At its best the newsroom is a bastion of camaraderie: ideas for angles, offers to contact each other’s sources, and a deep institutional knowledge worth countless hours of research. But these kind words belie an undercurrent of anxiety and jealously.
“Nice headline,” an editor says to a colleague, and the rest of us rush to agree; few things make reporters swell with such pride. Yet as our punny peer floats on Cloud 9, the rest of us are quietly stewing, wondering why no one said anything about our cheeky turns of phrase.
Take the negative feelings evoked by a poorly-performing and utterly inconsequential Facebook status update and magnify them with the knowledge that how you fare on this feed may dictate your career path and you have a sense of how deep the tensions flow. You’re only on the same team until one of you gets noticed by The New York Times, or a VC firm, or whatever escape hatch you’re reaching for. No one wants to blog forever.
Naturally the flames of competition spur an intense drive to improve, to one-up, to become a bigger name than the others. Be faster. Cleverer. Don’t second guess yourself so much. Management stokes these flames by distributing traffic reports under the guise of helping us discern “what works”, as if it weren’t already apparent from ‘social’ score counts splayed across each post.
And so we find each writer playing their own half-conscious game of chicken. Is this headline too cruel? Nah, it’s not nearly as bad as the one he wrote last week. Is my source concrete enough to publish this? Well, if I just hedge things a bit…
The exploits of the competition compound these effects — new tactics spread like a disease from site to site — but the competition are a bunch of hacks. It isn’t until bad behavior is condoned and encouraged at home, by the people we know to be decent and friendly, that we manage to convince ourselves that we are doing nothing wrong.
Eventually, thoughtlessly, we find ourselves impassioned with new convictions, a trigger-happy sense of outrage, and a numbness to the pain we inflict on others. Occasionally we worry we have gone too far and we look to our teammates, but they are there doing the same, are even further past the edge, looking back and cheering us on. We’re all marinating in the booze.
For more, get The Burned-Out Blogger’s Guide to PR.