The Information Diet

Choice Lessons

These issues aren’t new. In 1790, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, found himself the proud inheritor of all of his grandfather’s printing equipment and books. He quickly set up the Philadelphia Aurora, stating that “This paper will always be open, for the discussion of political, or any other interesting subjects, to such as deliver their sentiments with temper and decency, and whose motives appears to be, the public good.”[32] Or, like the now familiar Fox News slogan, that it would be “Fair and Balanced.”

Over the course of the next decade, Bache used his paper to denounce President Adams’ administration, and Adams’ party: the Federalists. The Federalists passed the Sedition Act in 1798, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing,” and quickly arrested Bache. Whether Bache’s accusations were true or not didn’t matter: public outrage ensued, and in the election of 1800, the Federalists didn’t just lose—their party was all but destroyed.

What’s different today is that new tyranny of the majority is more efficient than it used to be. It’s driven in real time by the tiny but meaningful transactions we have with our media providers every day. That’s why the world of politics is dividing into the world of MSNBC and DailyKos versus Fox and Andrew Breitbart. We now have the option to participate in the news realities we want to tune into, with the tribes we elect to be part of.

The New Media

Even more than television, Fox routinely tweaks the news on the Web to make the news more palatable to its audience. Even when it takes content from other sources like the Associated Press and puts it on its website, the organization tweaks the headlines to make them more attractive to its conservative audience. The AP’s story “Economic Worries Pose New Snags for Obama” turned into “Obama Has a Big Problem with White Women.” “Obama to Talk Economy, Not Politics, in Iowa” turned into “White House Insists Obama’s Iowa Stop for Economy, Not 2012.” And “Malaysia Police Slammed for Cattle-Branding Women” turned into “Malaysian Muslims Cattle-Brand Prostitutes.”

Fox isn’t about advancing a conservative agenda. For its parent, News Corporation, it’s about the dollars. Fox changes these headlines on the Web not because it has an agenda, but because people click on them more, meaning that more advertisements can be shown, and more money can be made. And Fox’s headline tweaking is just the beginning. With the Web, our choices aren’t even bound by the number of channels our cable boxes offer. With the Web, our choices are limitless.

Of course Foxnews.com isn’t the only web operation that does this. The Huffington Post is also into these shenanigans. On any given day, the Huffington Post’s homepage is a bizarre sight: a defense of New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman coupled with the “Top Embarrassing Photos of Obama’s Vacation.” “A Computer Chip Mimics the Human Brain,” it tells me, next to the warning: “Don’t Go Shopping with People Harder Than You.” Along the sidebar, we’re treated to images of celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and “make out sessions.”

These things are there, not because of Arianna Huffington’s contempt for the public, but because we click on them, and we click on them more than we click on anything else. The Huffington Post is a reflection of its readership’s interests. In just writing this bit about the site, I’ve found myself lost in its enormous sea of link-bait. There’s so much I need to know that I didn’t know I needed to know!

The Huffington Post has turned content-creation on its head, using technology to figure out what it is that people want, and finding the fastest way to give it to them. Just like the Cheesecake Factory tests its delicious cheesecakes in a test lab to make sure they’re delicious before they are set in front of you, the Huffington Post uses your behavior to understand what you want. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory though, they can do it in real-time.

They employ a technology called multivariate testing (or A/B testing) to figure out what users want in near real time. According to Paul Berry, CTO, the site randomly displays one of two headlines for the same story for five minutes. After the elapsed time, the version with the most clicks wins and everybody sees that one. The result is the same: sensational headlines. “Wisconsin Protests Have State GOP Sending State Troopers After Democrat” turned into “GOP Sends National Guard After Dem Leader.”[33]

The Huffington Post’s parent company, America Online, is far from its dialup and busy signal roots. AOL makes its money by acquiring content and selling advertisements. In 2011, it ranked as the fifth largest property online in the United States behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook. It reaches, in any given month, over a third of the United States population: about 110 million people.

The New Journalists

The industrialization of information is doing to journalists what the industrialization of farming did to farmers. In an effort to squeeze every bit of profit out of a piece of content, expensive journalists are being replaced by networks of less-qualified but much cheaper independent contractors. In the world of fiduciary responsibility, quality journalism means market inefficiency.

Though it still makes money from its Internet service provider business, today AOL is what’s known online as a content farm, and it shares a lot in common with its agricultural counterpart, the factory farm. AOL’s content is driven by a policy known as “The AOL Way,” a document in the form of a Powerpoint presentation that was leaked from AOL in early 2011. The AOL Way instructs the entire content arm of AOL on how it should operate.

The intent of The AOL Way is to decrease the costs and increase the profitability of the content the company produces. According to the plan, each editor should use four factors to decide what to cover: traffic potential, revenue potential, turn-around time, and at the bottom of the list, editorial quality. All editorial content staff are expected to write 5 to 10 stories per day, each with an average cost of $84, and a gross margin (from advertising) of 50%.

In short, it’s the job of the writer to produce popular content as cheaply and quickly as possible. That explains why the front page of AOL.com features the headline “Watch: Orangutan Gets Even With Rude Lady”; asks me to guess the age of the world’s oldest female bodybuilder; and offers me “Ten Bizarre Mosquito Prevention Tips.”

At the heart of The AOL Way is a technology called BlogSmith. It’s a software platform that allows editors to generate and produce content and measure their impact on the revenue and profitability of the network. AOL’s editors are instructed[34] to first use BlogSmith’s Demand module to identify topics in demand. BlogSmith looks at search query volume and breaks terms up into three categories: breaking (current trending topics), seasonal (topics historically in demand during certain time periods), and evergreen—topics that are consistently in demand across all AOL products.

Editors are then assigned these categories by their managers, and instructed to quickly write content matching these topics. (If management expects 5 to 10 posts per working day, then that’s about one post per hour.) Each post is to be tagged with popular search terms so that they’re more easily discoverable by search engines. Sarah Palin’s ride through downtown D.C. on Memorial Day was tagged on AOL-owned Huffington Post as: “2012 Election, Sarah Palin 2012, Elections 2012, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin For President, Palin 2012, Palin Bus Tour, Palin For President, Palin Motorcycle, Rolling Thunder, Sarah Palin Bus Tour, Sarah Palin Motorcycle, Politics News” to cover all the search bases.

BlogSmith then carefully tracks the return on investment. Under its performance tab, it tells the author that it cost $15 to make the piece of content, and it’s