Forsaking the mission in search of the almighty hit
Posted by Jeremy on December 11, 2009 · 4 Comments
I have a beef with our local newspaper, The Morning Call.
As a new resident I understand that it takes a while to get to know the area and the way news is done in a particular locale, but the past couple weeks of watching the MCall on the Web has disappointed me. I see them making and remaking some of the huge mistakes that got journalism into its current bit of trouble.
It started a couple weeks ago when, via the Twitter account, someone noted that a Tiger story was its most popular of the moment. First, great that you’re on Twitter and using it. But for this story? It was a story sourced entirely by TMZ, fit more for a gossip rag than a newspaper that claims to represent serious community conversation. And again … TMZ! Even my non-journalism students here at Lehigh know they’re sketchy.
I’ll get back to this one in a second, but for the sake of narrative just know that I registered my own reply via Twitter and let it go.
And then came today’s bit of stupid.
Whoever is manning the Twiter account tweeted that you could have fun playing a Flash game produced by Break.com on their site called “Help Tiger Run!” When you clicked on the link, this is what you saw:
Tiger Woods game ... bloody club ... no glorification of celebrity violence here!
OK, a bloody club. This looks perfectly nice. And when you click on the game itself, you play the role of Tiger Woods driving down the road in his Escalade (with another woman in the front seat with him) while being chased by his wife Elin (or at least a blond woman who seems like an awful-convincing stand-in).
Your goal is to not hit too many bumps or obstacles in the road, or else, his wife will catch up to you and start beating you (Tiger) in the head with said golf club. Repeatedly. As she’s doing so, blood squirts from Tiger’s head.
Yeah, this game is just rip-roaring fun. Incidentally, it’s also linked-to on the front page of the Web site right now.
It’s not hard to see the strategy between this disgusting Flash game and the promotion of the TMZ story. It’s all about hits. Whatever drives traffic to the Web site is good, regardless of whether it’s poorly sourced celebrity-gossip or a game that borders on being unethical/barbaric.
A funny thing happens, though, when your strategy becomes all about the next hit. You lose your journalistic soul in the process of becoming the lowest common denominator.
Yes, I'm sure this is the serious discussion of civic issues we look for in our news.
“Journalism is a discipline of verification.” Please tell me the words of Kovach & Rosenstiel aren’t lost entirely on a newsroom as it’s uploading a TMZ story to The Morning Call site. Yes, TMZ has broken some news. Yes, the information is out there. You know what? That’s why people go to their site. That isn’t why people go to yours.
In other words, it’s not your story. It may be in the news and a national story that people are following, but when a story like that breaks, the rubbernecking public doesn’t think, “I should go to the Morning Call web site to see the latest!” No, they go to the big guys, the ESPNs or CNNs. By being so desperate for hits that you’re promoting a Tiger Woods story on Twitter rather than your own locally produced content, you’re trying to compete against bigger media. And you can’t win that war.
Worse, the Morning Call missed the big lesson about the TMZ story. The most popular story on the site that day was a Tiger Woods story that happened in Florida, produced and sourced entirely by a celebrity gossip Web site? For a publication that produces a lot of original content? Really?
That dubious achievement shouldn’t have been a tweet. It should have been a call to action. Your local content isn’t good enough, original enough, buzzworthy enough to garner the most hits on your own Web site. Something has gone horribly wrong if you’re in that boat.
And that’s not even taking into account the Flash game. It’s the final white flag in a newspaper’s descent into irrelevance when you’re surrendered to the hit count at the expense of reflecting serious conversation about important issues and your community’s wants, needs, and values. This is your niche in the media cacophony, not trying to compete with ESPN.com on a story that isn’t yours.
My first thought today when I saw the game was to consider canceling my subscription. I may yet do so. In the end I know that my money helps the newspaper promote this infotainment trash for another day. If my newspaper can’t seem to realize that its role is to cover my local community with a sense of seriousness and dignity, then what is it good for? Newspapers have been arguing that we need to save them so we can save the serious journalism of our day. From this corner, things like this (which are more the rule than the exception) are evidence that the argument is more wishful thinking than reality.
Perhaps the Great Newspaper Apocalypse can’t come soon enough. Good reporters who cover their communities with rigor will always have jobs, because they’ll have our ear. This trash? Why go to The Morning Call when I can get it, well, anywhere?
That’s pretty disagreeable. I guess they don’t know the meaning of hyper local. We’ve talked about this before, but this confirms to me that the first thing I’d do if I took over a community newspaper again would be to cancel the AP wire.
That’s some insanity right there, and pretty surprising. My hometown paper was/is a piece of crap, and it doesn’t do this kind of thing (on the other hand, the elderly and conservative editor used to call in from his home in Florida at the end of each day to re-write the headlines to be maximally insulting to Democrats and other enemies). Here at WVU, the student paper is a pretty good city-oriented daily. Still, there’s the inevitable “celebrity gossip” bits penned by girls (so far I’ve only seen females) that probably hope to wind up at a NY magazine – nevermind nobody is reading the DA to find out about the Jonas Brothers. The difference is, these are new students, not journalists who should know better.
One funny thing is that this is the kind of thing traditional media criticizes bloggers for: Nothing original, just a series of links to others’ work – and typically (the story goes) with a decided lack of testicular fortitude that’s demonstrated by unwillingness to take responsibility for problems (since the work came from elsewhere). In fairness, it’s entirely possible that this kind of crap is a direct offshoot of those blogging worst practices. Regardless, communities deserve better in terms of both content AND taste.
Just clicked the mcall link, and was treated to two fantastic headlines:
“Jim Thorpe jolted by horrific fires” (I know it’s a city name; it’s still kinda funny)
“Breakin At St. Louis Rapper Nelly’s House” (editing error or dance party recap?)
What you describe is a disturbing trend that I see a lot of newspapers jumping on. Sports or entertainment garner the most hits to their sites, so they put most of the online promotion onto those two areas. Short term, sure, as you point out, it gains them hits. But long term, it costs them. They don’t become the source to make sense of the world for their readers … they just become one of many, many voices in a choir of gossip and hype.
The other problem with this strategy is that SEO-wise, some local paper (in Pennsylvania or where ever) will never be in the coveted Google triangle of the top five search results unless a reader plugs in “Tiger Woods” and the name of the town where the paper — not the news — is located. And who would do that. So they end up promoting content that isn’t local and that few people outside their immediate area will see. So how does that help to build an audience?
Plus … it ignors what Jeff Jarvis calls the “mass of niches.” To me, putting all your efforts into the “big-hit” national topics that lots of media are covering ignores the fact that to build a strong local audience means appealing to the deeply interested but small groups of niche readers. These niches build up into a larger audience in time.