Jay Rosen writes:
"In the end, you have to face blunt realities." So said David Talbot, Salon.com's editor and founder, explaining why he had to fire a group of 13 editors and writers after disappointing revenues alarmed the company's investors. "We looked at the hits and the sponsorship," Talbot also said, explaining how he determined who got the ax.
I think this is a fearful development. But it will not seem so if Talbot's "blunt realities" are granted the intellectual space they wish to occupy — as the single variety of realism that serious and informed people are permitted to practice. Salon's action was itself blunt, particularly in the use of hit counts and ad figures to decree who gets the death penalty. (Talbot's own wife was one of the unfortunates.) But whether his decision-making rule is the soul of realism depends very much on your view of the soul, and where it resides in matters editorial.
Realism might suggest that hit counts are an alarming precedent, in that they artificially limit the choices before the entire audience to those with appeal today to the largest portion of that audience. (With "largest" being a fungible term, so that "large enough" today becomes "too small" tomorrow.) Realism might add that since Salon seeks to make itself into a strong brand, and the soul of a brand is its distinctive qualities, then a policy of death-by-hit-count could undermine the treasured aim of brand building, since over time it builds into the site a more and more generic quality — which is the very opposite of a "brand."
Realism might further argue that, even if Books in Salon does not have the hit rate that Sex in Salon does (major discovery there), the smarter comparison may be between Books at Salon.com and Books at a contending editorial site, since Sex and Books are distinct markets, with distinct ad promise, distinct purposes in coloring the brand bright, distinct potential for traffic in the first place, and so on.
Realism might also benefit from the experience of some people in the catalogue biz, who learned that eliminating all items but the high-selling ones is bad strategy. Even if people don't buy some of the weirder stuff, they like it there in the environment, if only to define themselves against it. (Big soulful mystery there.) In this case, the sales figures conceal — they do not reveal — a complicated truth about users. Is it different with the Internet? Maybe. For as Lamar Graham says, a text doesn't exist on the Web until someone actively clicks and downloads it. But there could be a subliminal factor even here that causes people to value what they do not quite select. I do know this: the catalogues thought they were being realistic and tough-minded when they mistakenly trimmed the poorest-selling items.
Way back in 1982, our own Todd Gitlin wrote a book chapter on "Hill Street Blues," the NBC cop show that broke all the rules then existing on what TV viewers would accept. Almost every tenet of "audience lore," as he terms it, was contradicted by a show that featured multiple plot lines, a crowded visual field, too many characters, muddy sound, untidy narratives. Sure enough, "Hill Street" performed poorly in the ratings in the first year, bad enough to be canceled by executives who, as much as they like to make quality shows, must run the numbers, bite the bullet and, in the end, get real with themselves. Part of the reason NBC held back is that the critics raved. (But what do they know?) In its second season, "Hill Street" did rather better. By the third it became a hit. And the show went on to make a pile of money and spin off variants like "St. Elsewhere."
Bottom line: the numbers don't lie, intentionally that is. But they certainly can mislead, and they take time to tell the full story. (How much time? The numbers themselves won't say.) Had NBC canceled "Hill Street" after its first season, it would have been treated by the industry as a regrettable but necessary move. Only by a series of flukes do we now understand that it would have been a deluded action, too — deluded by realism, as it were. In fact, no one knows how many mistaken or plain craven decisions come down this way. Which isn't to say that every dropped travel section, canceled show, and folded magazine would have scored if given more time. (Nor is it to say that Talbot's action will necessarily prove costly to Salon.) But is to say: hold on there, realists and numbers-runners. Tell me you have the figures. Tell me you're bravely willing to face them. But don't tell me you know when the figures fail you. There are acts of faith involved in these decisions, too.
In Talbot's case, he must have faith that quality writers — people with something to say — can still be drawn to Salon's operation under what could become a permanent death-by-click threat, just possibly creating a creepy atmosphere in the editorial culture of the joint. Talbot should also have faith that after confirming the hit-rate principle as a valid one, its validity won't be forced on him again and again by nervous investors and itchy analysts who want to see more action on the cost side, and don't much care if it's destructive action. Faith is due that writers and editors won't take an anxious look at their daily (or is it hourly?) numbers and lose their heads trying to imitate the site's current winners, or recover from losses that wouldn't even register as "losses" if someone hadn't measured them at such-and-such an interval.
To me, Gitlin's NBC story, despite its age, is a parable about the limits of what we might call market realism. This is the variety Salon was universally said to be practicing. (So far, I have found no public criticism of Talbot, even from the victims, who are clearly being good about it.) Market realism seeks to validate as hard-headed and practical, often inevitable, whatever analyst-pleasing moves participants have recently made, whether or not they make deeper sense. Therefore it often tells the truth, and sometimes lies like a demon. But always it legitimates itself through a superior grasp of current realities.
Like its namesake, Socialist Realism, the Market variety is both an art form and an ideology, but here with pretensions to statistical science. Market thought in the realist vein is, of course, impatient with anything that cannot be counted. What doesn't show up in the numbers, but matters nonetheless, is a trouble-maker for the thought regime — as in my catalogue analogy. And trouble making factors can be silenced or put to sleep.
When David Talbot called media critic Sean Elder to tell him the bad news, "'It was one of those 'regret to inform' phone calls," Elder said. (The two are friends.) "He talked about the scrutiny we're getting, financial woes ... it didn't have anything to do with what I was producing." Please note: it didn't have anything to do with what Elder was producing. Well, clearly it did. That he accepted an opposite lesson tells me something: the death sentence apparently comes down from above, or up from below. When your number is up, or down, it's time to accept your fate and leave quietly. There's a kind of mean spirituality at work here, an acceptance before god of some inscrutable decision exercised via the audience and the grumblers on Wall Street. "It didn't have anything to do with what I was producing." Am I the only one who finds this a very strange statement?
The regime prefers — it virtually solicits — the one kind of opposition it can best understand and defeat, which is some form of woolly-headed idealism, sentimental in most cases, high-handed in some, but at all times refusing the hard facts that savvy people the world over (regretfully, manfully) grasp. In a word, market realism wants actuality exclusively to itself, and if you do not accept its conclusions, then the reason must be that actuality is not a site you visit very often. You're afraid of the real world, in flight from its lessons, protected against its daily tremblings. In a word, you're a child, crying about what the adults must by duty do.
Lamar Graham offers a sample when he reassures us that he's not an oppressor type: "I'm not suggesting slavery to the numbers and/or pandering to users, not by any means," he writes. "You can't make responsible, ethical editorial decisions solely on the basis of numbers." I think I understand: What the figures cannot tell us is how to be responsible, ethical and hold properly to our most important ideals. All the softer stuff. What they do tell us, it would seem, is how to be realistic, act grown up and face-the-music. The harder stuff. "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." Market realism, by contrast, is unafraid. And this is what worries me about it.
Graham is right to warn about a coming shake-out in Web journalism, and to fix his eye on that as the far bigger story. Despite all that I've said, he is also correct that click rates can be a sound tool in an evolving editorial policy and don't automatically lead to overkill or disaster. He is certainly correct that many journalists have lived for too long in splendid isolation from the people they write for, that the Web may bring an end to conditions of detachment that breed an irrational fear of the audience, as well as writerly arrogance. (I hope it happens.) He's probably right that cutbacks at Salon were inevitable, given the pressures. And everything he says about the nature of the Net as a distinct, even radically different publishing environment is to me interesting, important and right on.
But when he writes, "I think it's safe to say that the quantitative genie is out of the bottle," things in journalism just don't feel that safe to me, precisely because the Web is such a powerful tool for generating even more genies, when what we need is more genius.
