I’ve been thinking recently about online entertainment journalism, and pageviews, and the responsibilities and realities and everything involved. To explain what started this train of thought it something that’d get me more hassle than it’s worth – Suffice to say, it was the discovery that a site I used to work for wasn’t covering a particularly important news story because it was presumed it wouldn’t get hits – but, thinking about the subject over and over again, I find myself depressingly out of step with the way that the Internet works, it feels like.
I mean, I get that it’s all about the hits. I worked for Gawker Media for two years, and that really gets drummed into you there, or at least it did for me: The eyeballs are what matter, the clicks and the important clicks, not just any clicks. It’s a number that constantly gets whittled down: At first, it was hits, then it was “unique visitors,” then it was “new unique visitors” (Eventually, it’ll be “People who’ve never even been online before, but bought a laptop just to read your piece,” and then people will get fired for not inspiring at least one MacBook purchase every week). That’s not just the case at Gawker sites, though; elsewhere, I’ve had series killed because the hits weren’t good enough, pitches approved based solely on how much traffic they would likely bring even if they were weaker ideas than other ones vying for attention, the whole thing. The internet exists to get your attention, after all.
And yet, that all seems curiously, unhealthily, short-term thinking to me. “Content is King” was the mantra of the Internet for awhile, the idea of “If you build it, they will come” made into something resembling a business plan. It was… optimistic, naive, maybe? There was a sense of good work will find an audience because it’s the Internet – which, come to think of it, feels like part of the thinking behind Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing ideas nowadays. Hmm – that was ultimately replaced by “Content is Content,” which translated into something along the lines of “Fuck it, we can get people to write for us for free and who cares whether or not it’s good as long as it drives traffic, right?” The quality of the work became secondary – if even that – to the fact that the work existed. Curation became more along the lines of “Will this get hits?” than “Is this any good?” because everyone had to earn their keep, and so sites became less about an editorial voice or vision, and more interchangeable as a result with everyone chasing after the same exclusives, the same images and videos and interviews and with the same formula to write it all up.
Surely, if you’re looking to make your site stand out, it makes more sense to decide to actually have its own voice and viewpoint? Have a sense of. Okay, this doesn’t get good traffic but it’s something we should be covering, so we’re going to take the hit on it? Comics Alliance feels like a good example of this; consider the way that the site followed Laura’s passions to the point where it became known for doing so, and for having smart, nuanced writing on gender and webcomics and other subjects that weren’t being covered by other comic sites. It’s a return to “If you build it, they will come,” definitely, but – and this is where I find myself out of step with the Internet – what’s so wrong with that? If you wait long enough, they will come.
Weirdly, surprisingly, Gawker may have the best solution to this issue (That’s Gawker.com, not all of Gawker Media); the idea of traffic-whoring to offset more important, more individual and quieter pieces felt like the closest to an elegant solution to the problem that we could get, short of someone having the guts to say “Screw it, let’s just do good work we believe in and hope for the best.” It feels like it’s a way for sites to fulfill hit/financial responsibilities to their owners, while also the responsibility to readers of something worth reading. I wonder how that experiment worked out…?
Ramble ramble ramble. I should come back to this when I know what it’s clearer in my head.