Medium, The Reason You Can’t Stand the News Anymore {what’s Up}
Editors, writers, and executives at today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive. In any other business, companies would try, fail, and another would take its place. This is good and needed.
But for news, the failures are happening at a glacial pace and bad actors are profiting as the trustworthiness of our news outlets are breaking down in slow motion. The result is the worst kind of feedback loop, where well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets leading to a total breakdown in discourse.
You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented divisiveness in our country. And it’s time we realized what’s going on.
Throughout quarantine, Swizz Beatz and Timbaland’s Verzuz battle series has grown from a novel event bridging hip-hop’s past and present into uplifting excitement in our indoor spring and summer, joining DJ sessions by D-Nice, Questlove, and others (as well as Tory Lanez’s unpredictable, short-lived Quarantine Radio series) as the must-see remote-but-live viewing for rap and R&B fans while live shows and festivals are sidelined by COVID-19. Verzuz reimagines the DJ battles of hip-hop’s early days for the “one gotta go” set. The premise is simple: Two prominent producers (or singers or songwriters) pair up live on Instagram and compete to decide who has the better catalog. The rules came together on the fly through trial and error. As it stands, each battle goes 20 rounds, with each contestant playing a hit and hearing a rebuttal.
Verzuz is fun, simple, and wide open — maybe a little too wide open. The audience is mostly in charge of the scoring, and there’s rarely a consensus on points. Regional bias and generational schisms creep up. Playing a deep cut almost categorically loses you the point, even if it’s one of the greatest songs of all time. There’s nothing wrong with a slugfest, but it’s draining hearing people trash timeless classics. You can be a legend with decades of hits and lose the crowd trailing too far away from radio. You can be a veteran who changed the game forever and get smoked in the court of public opinion because someone else’s music is fresher in everyone’s shared memory. You can score points with records mostly made by someone else. If you’ve cultivated a relationship with an A-list artist, you’re almost guaranteed the win.
In spite of these minor issues, Verzuz is making drab weekends and weeknights feel fun again and restoring a spirit of friendly competition to the game. It’s also teaching fans how many heads it can take to make a hit record. You might hear the same song at three different battles: once from a producer, again from a co-producer, and then again from a songwriter who helped fine-tune melodies or flesh out lyrics. That said, hits being repeated also highlights a need for greater variety in the cast of contestants, a concern Swizz and Timbaland seem to be addressing in the lineup going forward. Still, Verzuz needs more talent from different regions and different eras, and it desperately needs more women. While we wait to find out what happens next, particularly after partnering with Apple Music in late July, let’s go over what we’ve seen so far, ranked from best to worst to absolutely doomed.
An extreme example? Yes. But this disconnect is why, despite good intentions of digital news outlets, nearly all eventually drift into a weird double life. One where, on one hand, they are producing objective journalism that improves Americans’ understanding about their world. While on the other, they are subverting any trust gained from that journalism to make money.
How? If my media friends will forgive the oversimplification, the current news landscape requires the following order of operations.
Step 1: Accelerate your reach via social media (mostly Facebook) by optimizing much of your content to be frequently shared.
Step 2: Leverage your reach and sell advertising space on your website using programmatic (or automated) advertising technology.
Step 3: Leverage your reach some more by selling “native advertising” or “sponsored content” for select companies.
Step 4: Repeat from step 1.
These incentives align fine for most editorial websites. But when applied to current events/news coverage, none of the methods to increase revenue involve uncovering corruption or increasing understanding. The above steps can be profitable without ever being “correct” or “fair” or nuanced or any of the many characteristics of capital-J Journalism. Instead, each way of making money creates an unending pressure for scale and reach at all costs. Let’s look at specific examples.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is advertising that is automatically placed on webpages. These ads often aren’t directly sold by any sales team and there is little quality control on either the advertiser side or the publication side. So on one side of the equation you have national brands with ads on shady propaganda websites. On the other, you have morally suspect advertising appearing on legitimate news outlets. As an example, below is an ad on a Washington Post story masquerading as news story about Dwayne Johnson being arrested (which never happened). And if you click the ad, it takes you to a site deceptively made to look like ESPN that is selling muscle supplements. Via Ryan Singel
The outrageous showdown between Atlanta-based hitmakers The-Dream and Sean Garrett is the reason Verzuz now has ground rules. Dream — who has helped craft scores of hits, including Beyoncés “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body,” and made memorable songs of his own in “Falsetto” and “Rockin’ That Shit” — was cordial and timely in his Sunday night scrap. Garrett is best known to people who don’t read liner notes as the guest on Nicki Minaj’s “Massive Attack” but renowned to those in the know as the co-writer and/or co-producer of singles like Usher’s “Yeah!,” Ciara’s “Goodies,” and Yonce bangers like “Ring the Alarm.” That said, he showed up late mugging lasciviously at the camera and letting records rock too long. (This is why contestants are only allowed to play a song up to the first chorus now.) Antics ate up most of the first hour, where Dream let loose a steady stream of solid tunes, and Garrett played songs at random, digging up Blueprint 3–era Jay-Z songs and premiering unreleased solo cuts. But the scales tipped, and the fight got good when Garrett pulled it together and started to match Dream song for song.
Who won? The crowd swore Garrett smoked Dream, but what really happened is that he pulled a Rocky. He ate shots through the early rounds and came out swinging near the end when his opponent wound down. But this isn’t boxing. There aren’t knockouts. It matters that Sean blew the first hour. It also matters that Dream let a comfortable lead slip, giving up too many points by leaving too much heat on the table. Sean won … but it was close.
This ad is purposefully made to deceive the reader and more marketers are catching on: they can do any unethical thing they’d like to get the clicks and conversions they want. Meanwhile, news publications aren’t (or can’t afford to be) policing their ads. Seedy brands are literally stealing the credibility of news sites for a few pennies. And ironically, many of these terrible ads link to sites containing purposefully untrue news. Both the ad AND the destination of the ad undermine the credibility of all news outlets.
Highlights: The-Dream playing mini-golf on camera as Garrett came in seemingly sloshed and delivered impromptu opening remarks, Dream showing off the demo version of Jay-Z’s “Holy Grail” with himself on the hook instead of Justin Timberlake, Garrett spooking the crowd with love faces, famous spectators like Fat Joe, Kelly Rowland, and Rick Ross getting fed up and acting out in the comments.
This is on the news site’s homepage. Barely anyone consumes news that way, so what’s the big deal? Yes, most content is consumed via social and search. This is why the trend in online publishing is to go where the people are and be platform agnostic — to post content to platforms like Snapchat and Facebook. News outlets don’t only do this for their content. They do this for their sponsored content (thus becoming “native advertising”).
Of course, the news outlet has no control over their presentation on these platforms, further blurring the trust between what is “real” and “reported” and what is “fake” or “advertising.” Below are two Bloomberg stories on Facebook. On left: a typical reported news story (link). Right: content produced for ANA Japan and then paid to be promoted on Facebook under the Bloomberg name (link). See how subtle the markers are?
Highlights: The-Dream playing mini-golf on camera as Garrett came in seemingly sloshed and delivered impromptu opening remarks, Dream showing off the demo version of Jay-Z’s “Holy Grail” with himself on the hook instead of Justin Timberlake, Garrett spooking the crowd with love faces, famous spectators like Fat Joe, Kelly Rowland, and Rick Ross getting fed up and acting out in the comments.
