Lamar Graham writes:
Before we lose ourselves in high dudgeon, let's not forget the real news here: that independent Internet-based journalism is in big trouble. I like Salon.com a lot, I read it every day. But I'm not optimistic about its prospects. In the past two weeks or so, both MediaWatch.org, a media-criticism(!) site, and APBnews.com, the crime-news portal, have given up the ghost. Obits for other sites, no doubt, are forthcoming. And at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, I'm not surprised. There's been just as much hapless optimism, fatal arrogance and naked get-rich-quick-ism in Web publishing as there has been in every other sector of the Internet economy. Did anyone really think the chickens wouldn't eventually come home to roost?
The do-it-yourself days of Internet journalism are over. Producing professional-caliber journalism online is costly, complicated and labor-intensive — just like putting out a newspaper or publishing a magazine or producing TV news. Except that newspapers and magazines and TV news have found a business model — advertising — that works well for them. Alas, there's no viable, proven economic model right now for Web journalism.
The only Web sites that can hope to sustain themselves on advertising are the ones that can generate a consistently enormous volume of traffic — e.g. search engines. Few, if any, news sites fit that bill. Yet unless you're The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, you can't get away with charging a subscription fee, either (just ask the folks at Slate.com). People are constitutionally opposed to paying for mere "content." Unless your site performs a "service" of some kind — i.e. making a financial transaction or performing some kind of data analysis that it would be a pain for the user to do in the real world — you can't get away with charging your users. Information, as the hackers like to say, wants to be free.
To reiterate, I love Salon.com. I loved APBnews.com. But once the venture capital money and the IPO windfalls are spent, laudable journalistic intentions alone won't pay the bills. And once the stock tanks, paper millionaires don't have much cash to plow back into operations (even if they were inclined to do so). I predict that we'll see more original-content sites fail and more consolidation of online news into the hands of traditional name brands, because for the foreseeable future the best way to subsidize new-media losses will be with old-media earnings. I think that's the big story here, the real news. What it means is topic for another debate.
As for the method: assuming that those laid off were, in fact, those whose work generated the least traffic (and personally, I suspect there were other factors involved, David Talbott's terse quote in the Times notwithstanding), the situation still doesn't strike me as an example of "corporate priorities run amok." From my perspective, the Salon.com layoffs are a fairly prosaic demonstration of the high-tech startup survival instinct. Sure, it would be nice if the site had never gotten itself into such straits in the first place, but given the dire reality — slash operating costs immediately, or else — the tried-and-true method of laying people off strikes me as a wholly logical and necessary move (albeit one that smacks of desperation). And sometimes the layoffs have to come from the newsroom. In which case the litmus test employed by Salon.com seems at least as fair as any I can come up with.
A little reality check is in order here. As institutions, newspapers and magazines and broadcast news operations have lived and died by statistics — audited circulation, ratings, etc. — for decades. Individual journalists, however, generally have been spared the personal consequences of the numbers game. I think there are three main reasons for this. First, as a practical matter, it's just too hard and too costly to measure, on a ongoing, daily basis, whether readers and viewers actively look at particular stories in the paper or on TV. (Otherwise, I guarantee we'd already be doing it.) Second, bringing numbers into the newsroom smacks of focus-group journalism, and nobody wants to be accused of that. Finally, because print and broadcast are passive media, and therefore insidious, your audience can soak up information accidentally. Thus, there's osmotic value in people simply being exposed to the headlines regularly, even if they don't closely read or watch every story: hopefully, ultimately, something will sink in.
But the Internet isn't like a newspaper or a magazine or broadcast news. For one thing, monitoring and parsing traffic — knowing precisely how many visitors you have every day and what kind of browser software they use, how many pages they look at and the paths by which they negotiate the site, etc. — is relatively easy, inexpensive and instant. Moreover, the notion that using stats to determine the allocation of editorial resources is de facto proof of business-side meddling is old-media thinking. On the Web, traffic patterns aren't "business" data — they're technical data that happen to have various implications for both business and editorial operations.
I'm not suggesting slavery to the numbers and/or pandering to users, not by any means. You can't make responsible, ethical editorial decisions solely on the basis of numbers. Yet traffic analysis is a powerful and valuable tool, and I firmly believe that online editors should avail themselves of it. For instance, say a specific section of your site — let's say the media-criticism area — seems to be assiduously ignored by visitors. Shouldn't you examine the stats and try to figure out why? Maybe you'll discover that users are getting hung up on a broken link and that a small technical fix is all that's required to restore business. Maybe you'll determine that the section is simply too hard to find and that you can improve traffic by relocating it within the site and promoting it better. Or maybe you'll come to the conclusion that media criticism isn't as central to your mission as you'd like to believe. Or that if you want it to be, you'll need to find critics who do a better job of engaging your audience.
Should, say, the online edition of The New York Times quit covering Bosnia simply because nobody's interested in Bosnia stories right now? Of course not, if only because the Times has a responsibility to have an apparatus in place when Bosnia is a hot story again. But should Salon.com devote a large chunk of its shrinking resources to media criticism if traffic analysis consistently demonstrates that the audience just isn't interested. I think not. Indeed, why do we assume that independent online news sites should necessarily look and act like their old-media counterparts? Newspapers, magazines and broadcast news are the real-world equivalent of what Web people call "portals" — broad gateways to information, one-stop-shopping sites. Read the Times and get all the news that's fit to print. That's fine on paper, but one of the great economic lessons of the Internet over the past few years has been that, in the main, portals don't work. The Web is about specificity, about niches. People visit particular sites for particular kinds of information. Why should we try to pound square pegs into round holes? We can't just transplant all the old ways of thinking and doing business. We have to pay attention to what the Net is trying telling us about its essential nature.
Frankly, I believe what's really got us journalists scared here is the idea of being held personally, quantitatively accountable for whether our work really reaches anyone. Horrors! What are we, widget salesmen? Assembly-line workers? Because the numbers have never been brought to bear on us, we fear and loathe them. We maintain that mere statistics can't possibly measure the intellectual value of our work.
But they can to some degree.
Remember that the Internet is an interactive, not passive, medium. Binary data on a hard drive somewhere have no intrinsic communicative value, they don't catch your eye as you pass a newsstand or seep into your consciousness as background noise. On the Web, a story doesn't exist, has no potential intellectual energy, no power to communicate anything, unless and until someone actively chooses a specific URL, loads the prescribed files into a browser and looks at the "page" that results. If nobody's clicking on your stories, you're not even providing filler for ads. You are the sound of one hand clapping.
So I'm unwilling to concede that the use of traffic stats to help determine who got the ax at Salon.com sets a precedent that's necessarily dangerous. If heads absolutely have to roll — if there's no other alternative — why is it wrong to ask whose work, however much it impresses it creator and his/her editors, reaches the fewest people, generates the fewest ad avails and therefore contributes the least to the financial viability of the site? It's tempting, I suppose, to jerk our knees and convince ourselves that using traffic stats to justify layoffs is a sinister threat to important but controversial voices, yet I don't see any evidence of that in the case of Salon.com. Besides, if you're not drawing any traffic, you can hardly claim you're being silenced by the Man. It's users who have chosen not to pay you any attention; the Man has merely decided to stop paying you.
The Web is a whole new animal, still evolving rapidly, but I think it's safe to say that the quantitative genie is out of the bottle. Journalists who want to work on the Internet must come to terms with the idea that they're going to be held accountable, to some degree, for genuinely reaching people. That's scary, perhaps, but that's the way it's going to be. And I'm not sure that's such a terrible thing. Frankly, I find it both a little amusing and a little hypocritical that we journalists — we who are so judgmental, we who are always demanding accountability of corporate lackeys, celebrities, government bureaucrats and other mere mortals — are scared so witless of having to prove that our own ideas have some actual value in the marketplace of ideas.
I, for one, would love to see how much traffic is generated by this little exercise we're engaged in right now. I suspect that the numbers would be humbling indeed.
