No really, We're In the Golden Age Of Journalism
From Wired:
When I first arrived in New York, some time back in the last century, I gazed in awe and fascination at subway riders reading The New York Times.
Thanks to a precise and universally adopted method of folding the paper
(had it been taught in schools?), they could read it and even turn its
pages without thrusting them in anyone else's face. The trick? Folding
those big, inky broadsheets into neat little rectangles—roughly the same
size, in fact, as an iPad. It's as if they were trying to turn the
newspaper into a mobile device. And that, we can now see, is precisely
what news is meant for. Today, New York newspaper origami is an
all-but-lost art; straphangers have their eyes glued to their
smartphones.
Journalism, however, is holding its own. Statistics from the Times
say roughly half of the people who read it now do so with their mobile
devices, and that jibes with figures from the latest Pew report on the
news media broadly. But if you were to assume that means people have
given up reading actual articles and are just snacking instead, you'd be
wrong. The Atlantic recently reported that a gorgeously
illustrated 6,200-word story on BuzzFeed—which likewise gets about half
its readers through mobile devices—not only received more than a million
views, it held the attention of smartphone users for an average of more
than 25 minutes (WIRED's in-depth web offerings have also attracted
audiences. A profile of a brilliant Mexican schoolgirl garnered 1.2
million views, 25 percent of them from phones, and readers spent an
average of 18 minutes on it.)
Little wonder that for every fledgling
enterprise like Circa, which generates slick digests of other people's
journalism on the theory that that's what mobile readers want, you have
formerly short-attention-span sites like BuzzFeed and Politico retooling
themselves to offer serious, in-depth reporting. “Maybe we're entering
into a new golden age of journalism,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen
mused in a recent blog post, “and we just haven't recognized it yet.”
Even just two years ago, such an
assessment would have seemed almost ludicrous. Demand Media, the
“content farm” that went public in 2011 in an IPO that saw it valued
more highly than the Times, seemed like it was going to be the
way of the future. Its business model was breathtakingly cynical: With
an algorithm dictating what they should write about, people working at
peasant wages churned out valueless verbiage that could be festooned
with loads of advertising and optimized to turn up at the top of a list
of search results. “They really understand consumer behavior on the web
and how to build businesses on it,” Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg told Bloomberg Businessweek
at the time. In fact, they understood neither: After Google changed its
search algorithm to penalize low-quality, ad-heavy sites, Demand
Media's traffic and stock price collapsed. Other outfits relying on
similar search engine optimization tactics to generate big bucks with
crap content have experienced the same fate.
Media investors and entrepreneurs began to realize they'd need
distribution that Google didn't control—like social media, which doesn't
rely so heavily on search results. But this strategy means those
stories and videos have to appeal to humans, not algorithms, and for
that they need to be satisfying....MORE
