The offices of Gawker Media, the ascendant blog empire based in SoHo, look little like the newsroom of the New York Times a few miles to the north. But the driving difference between the two is the flat-screen TV that hovers over the room.
This is the Big Board, and on it are a list of articles and numbers. The numbers represent the number of times each article has been read, and they’re big: Gawker’s Web sites routinely see hundreds of millions of page views a month. The Big Board captures the top posts across the company’s Web sites, which focus on everything from media (Gawker) to gadgets (Gizmodo) to porn (Fleshbot). Write an article that makes it onto the Big Board, and you’re liable to get a raise. Stay off it for too long, and you may need to find a different job.
At the New York Times, reporters and bloggers aren’t allowed to see how many people click on their stories. This isn’t just a rule, it’s a philosophy that the Times lives by: The point of being the newspaper of record is to provide readers with the benefit of excellent, considered editorial judgment. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” New York Times editor Bill Keller said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’” Readers can vote with their feet by subscribing to another paper if they like, but the Times doesn’t pander. Younger Times writers who are concerned about such things have to essentially bribe the paper’s system administrators to give them a peek at their stats. (The paper does use aggregate statistics to determine which online features to expand or cut.)
If the Internet’s current structures mostly tend toward fragmentation and local homogeneity, there is one exception: The only thing that’s better than providing articles that are relevant to you is providing articles that are relevant to everyone. Traffic watching is a new addiction for bloggers and managers—and as more sites publish their most-popular lists, readers can join in the fun too.
Of course, journalistic traffic chasing isn’t exactly a new phenomenon: Since the 1800s, papers have boosted their circulations with sensational reports. Joseph Pulitzer, in honor of whom the eponymous prizes are awarded each year, was a pioneer of using scandal, sex, fearmongering, and innuendo to drive sales.
But the Internet adds a new level of sophistication and granularity to the pursuit. Now the Huffington Post can put an article on its front page and know within minutes whether it’s trending viral; if it is, the editors can kick it by promoting it more heavily. The dashboard that allows editors to watch how stories are doing is considered the crown jewel of the enterprise. Associated Content pays an army of online contributors small amounts to troll search queries and write pages that answer the most common questions; those whose pages see a lot of traffic share in the advertising revenue. Sites like Digg and Reddit attempt to turn the whole Internet into a most-popular list with increasing sophistication, by allowing users to vote submitted articles from throughout the Web onto the site’s front page. Reddit’s algorithm even has a kind of physics built into it so that articles that don’t receive a constant amount of approval will begin to fade, and its front page mixes the articles the group thinks are most important with your personal preferences and behavior—a marriage of the filter bubble and the most-popular list.
Las Ultimas Noticias, a major paper in Chile, began basing its content entirely on what readers clicked on in 2004: Stories with lots of clicks got follow-ups, and stories with no clicks got killed. The reporters don’t have beats anymore—they just try to gin up stories that will get clicks.
At Yahoo’s popular Upshot news blog, a team of editors mine the data produced by streams of search queries to see what terms people are interested in, in real time. Then they produce articles responsive to those queries: When a lot of people search for “Obama’s birthday,” Upshot produces an article in response, and soon the searchers are landing on a Yahoo page and seeing Yahoo advertising. “We feel like the differentiator here, what separates us from a lot of our competitors is our ability to aggregate all this data,” the vice president of Yahoo Media told the New York Times. “This idea of creating content in response to audience insight and audience needs is one component of the strategy, but it’s a big component.”
And what tops the traffic charts? “If it bleeds, it leads” is one of the few news maxims that has continued into the new era. Obviously, what’s popular differs among audiences: A study of the Times’s most-popular list found that articles that touched on Judaism were often forwarded, presumably due to the Times’s readership. In addition, the study concluded, “more practically useful, surprising, affect-laden, and positively valenced articles are more likely to be among the newspaper’s most e-mailed stories on a given day, as are articles that evoke more awe, anger, and anxiety, and less sadness.”
Elsewhere, the items that top most-popular lists get a bit more crass. The site Buzzfeed recently linked to the “headline that has everything” from Britain’s Evening Herald: “Woman in Sumo Wrestler Suit Assaulted Her Ex-girlfriend in Gay Pub After She Waved at a Man Dressed as a Snickers Bar.” The top story in 2005 for the Seattle Times stayed on the most-read list for weeks; it concerned a man who died after having sex with a horse. The Los Angeles Times’s top story in 2007 was an article about the world’s ugliest dog.
Responsiveness to the audience sounds like a good thing—and in a lot of cases, it is. “If we view the role of cultural products as giving us something to talk about,” writes a Wall Street Journal reporter who looked into the most-popular phenomenon, “then the most important thing might be that everyone sees the same thing and not what the thing is.” Traffic chasing takes media making off its Olympian heights, placing journalists and editors on the same plane with everyone else. The Washington Post ombudsman described journalists’ often paternalistic approach to readers: “In a past era, there was little need to share marketing information with the Post’s newsroom. Profits were high. Circulation was robust. Editors decided what they thought readers needed, not necessarily what they wanted.”
The Gawker model is almost the precise opposite. If the Washington Post emulates Dad, these new enterprises are more like fussy, anxious children squalling to be played with and picked up.
When I asked him about the prospects for important but unpopular news, the Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte smiled. On one end of the spectrum, he said, is sycophantic personalization—“You’re so great and wonderful, and I’m going to tell you exactly what you want to hear.” On the other end is the parental approach: “I’m going to tell you this whether you want to hear this or not, because you need to know.” Currently, we’re headed in the sycophantic direction. “There will be a long period of adjustment,” says Professor Michael Schudson, “as the separation of church and state is breaking down, so to speak. In moderation, that seems okay, but Gawker’s Big Board is a scary extreme, it’s surrender.”
