Advance Publications, the owners of the Ann Arbor News, made the national news a few days ago when New York Times columnist David Carr announced that, in an attempt to drive increased web traffic to the website of their Portland paper, The Oregonian, they were requiring all of their reporters to post three stories per day, and assessing them on the their individual readership metrics… Here’s a clip:
…The Portland, Ore., newspaper The Oregonian, the much heralded home of many Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, is in the midst of a reorganization driven by the desire for more web traffic, according to internal documents obtained by Willamette Week, a weekly newspaper in Portland. A year after big layoffs and a reduction in home delivery to four times a week, The Oregonian, owned by Newhouse’s Advance Publications, is focusing on digital journalism — and the people who produce it — with a great deal of specificity.
Beginning immediately, according to the documents, the company’s leadership will require reporters to post new articles three times a day, and to post the first comment under any significant article. It’s part of a companywide initiative to increase page views by 27.7 percent in the coming year. Beyond that, reporters are expected to increase their average number of daily posts by 25 percent by the middle of the year and an additional 15 percent in the second half of the year.
If that sounds like it won’t leave much time for serious work, the new initiative also calls for reporters to “produce top-flight journalistic and digitally oriented enterprise as measured by two major projects a quarter,” which will include “goals by projects on page views and engagement.” In the more-with-less annals of corporate mandates, this one is a doozy. Contacted by email, Peter Bhatia, who is departing as editor of The Oregonian, scheduled an interview, but then declined to comment…
To state the obvious, it’s difficult to win a Pulitzer when you’re expected to publish three stories per day, and engage in online discussions with readers.
There’s not been any word, at least that I’ve heard, that a similar “three-stories-a-day” mandate has been handed down at the Ann Arbor News, or at any of the other M-Live outlets, all of which are owned by the Newhouse family, but clearly there’s a move in that direction.
I should add that this post wasn’t meant to be an indictment of our local reporters, or, for that matter, their immediate supervisors at the Ann Arbor News. These decisions are being made at the corporate level, and the local folks with M-Live are being forced to do the best they can in an increasingly difficult environment. I don’t envy them. They’re busting their asses to turn out quality journalism, but, given the time constraints they’re under, that’s getting harder every day. (It’s near impossible to develop meaningful investigative features when, by and large, you’re relying on relatively young reporters who don’t have established contacts, and you’re not giving them the time necessary to run down leads, etc.)
As much as I’d like to lay all of this at the feet of the Newhouse family, it’s worth noting that the public at large deserves some of the blame as well. It’s largely because we stopped paying for papers that this is happening. You can argue that, if the product was better, we would have kept paying our annual subscription fees, but, the truth is, we’ve come to expect our news in the post-internet world to be free. One hopes that changes in time, and people begin to see a value in underwriting the work of professional journalists, but, as of right now, that’s clearly not the case… And, as a result, circulations continue to dwindle, and, with them, advertising revenue.
And, because of this, we’re in this weird place right now, where, sans subscribers, the owners of newspapers need to demonstrate to their remaining advertisers that they have online readers. And, thanks to sophisticated analytics, they know exactly what kinds of articles drive those numbers. So, as a result, we’re seeing more divisive content from our local news sources. We’re seeing more sensationalistic, social media-friendly headlines. We’re seeing the stoking of more Comment Section Shitstorms (CSS)… It’s not about disseminating news. It’s not about building communities. It’s about desperately chasing clicks, however you can get them.
One last thing… I know that the newspaper business has always been a business. I’m not under any illusions in that regard. I know that there’s always been sensationalism. I know that journalists have always been rewarded by how well their work was liked in the community. I just think that, when we started driving our most senior reporters from the industry, and demanding that their replacements write three stories with click-worthy headlines a day, we crossed a line. And I think we’re all going to pay a big price for it.
Democracy cannot function without a free and aggressive independent press. And we’re about to discover that firsthand.