I can speak firsthand to the pressure on journalists that comes from the breaking of the bundle described in Jim's blog. Most of my journalism career I was with hard-copy publications -- magazines, newsletters -- but I spent a year as Washington Bureau Chief for CNET News.com, an online wire service. At CNET each story stands alone, and the clickthrough of each story can be precisely measured. Reporters were frequently informed by editors which of their stories were most closely read.

I was the only reporter consistently writing on policy issues, and it was assumed that my stories wouldn't be as exciting to the average CNET reader as an article on the latest MP3 player. But I did have stories that created great spikes. Napster was a big controversy at that time, and every time I filed a story with "Napster" in the title, the story generated a huge hit rate. I began to feel subtle pressure to write more Napster stories, even when there wasn't much to report.

To give credit to my editors, no one ever came out and said I had to write on one issue and I couldn't possibly write on another (like cybersecurity, which almost always drew a yawn from readers). Sometimes reporters do experience that in newsrooms for quite legitimate reasons -- it's done by assignment editors -- but CNET gave me a wide leash to decide what was most important to cover in Washington. But CNET was also losing money, its stock was dropping (as an owner of options and a participant in the employee stock purchase program I was well aware of that) so I understood the desire to generate more clickthroughs; that often manifested itself in a copyeditor writing a tease for my story that painted a policy threat far more dire than my article articulated.

Obviously newspapers need to sell, so there has always been pressure on reporters to write stories that are not just important but compelling to readers. Newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries were downright hysterical. However, it is also true that in a disaggregated media environment, where stories stand alone with clickthrough ads and are competing with spicy blogs, the pressure on a reporter to jazz up a story and create a wee bit of hysteria is fairly significant.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 10:16 AM | Media: Video, Music...

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