I’m sure you’ve been there. You’re standing in line at the grocery store and you feel the impulse to reach into your pocket and grab your phone, or you get a push notification about the next in the never-ending string of horrors the Trump Years have brought us. We’ve known about this for years, but now it has a name: the attention economy. Billions of dollars are spent every single year trying to make you spend as much time as possible “engaged” with Big Tech’s products, so they can harvest your data and deliver you personalized advertising, all in the service of reaping massive profits for their billionaire owners and shareholders.

The news media is guilty of this, too. We spend hours poring over data to see which stories generate the most clicks and then try to reverse-engineer what grabs your attention and give you more of that. At its core, this type of editorial strategy rhymes with what the Big Tech companies are doing to you as well: tapping into base emotions and human psychology to get you to spend time looking at a screen, hopefully the screen with our stuff on it, so we can make a few bucks. 

At The American Prospect, we want to do things differently. Sure, we could cook up 3-5 stories a day that we didn’t break about the most recent outrage, and generate tons of clicks. But we’re trying to build a relationship with you, where you trust us to shine our attentional light onto the things that matter. We’re not here to cynically manipulate you into “engaging” with our “product” with meaningless clickbait. We want to write stories that leave you feeling informed and maybe even inspired to go out into the world and make it a better place. Or at least understand who has power and what they’re doing with it, and how it can be taken back to benefit all of us. 

The business model for media companies is deeply broken. Either they’re catering to the individual ideologies of their oligarch owner or dependent on advertising revenue, and therefore clicks, to stay in business. Or, in the best case, they’re writing to a privileged audience, usually behind a paywall, who largely already agrees with what they are saying.

I’ve always believed that the business model of a media company is more important to the editorial output than many people think. Our particular business model—one that relies heavily on regular people to voluntarily pay for writing that they will always be able to access for free—enables us to be fearless, independent, and free from the kinds of incentives that tempt us into manipulating you into clicking on our stories.

We don’t want to steal your attention, we want to earn it.

The only way this works is if we hold up our end of the bargain: producing, day in and day out, the kind of reporting, analysis, and storytelling you find so valuable that you’re willing to pay for it, even though we’ve chosen to forgo a business model that forces you to do so.

I’ve been accused of naïveté before and that might be true. Maybe we’d make more money if we used the latest and greatest techniques to hijack your attention for clicks; if we made our content “stickier”; if we put critical reporting and analysis behind a paywall so only a small, well-heeled audience could read it. 

But Betrand Russell once wrote in his work In Praise of Idleness, “The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy.” I think that applies to our case as well. 

That said, we have bills to pay, reporters to send into the field, and servers to run. Thus, I am humbly asking for your support, not to maximize our shareholder value, but to impact the world and provide this valuable service to our readers.

This is a long-winded way of saying we need your support to do what we do. A generous donor has offered to match every donation made today so we can reach our goal for this fundraising campaign. If you want to opt out of the attention economy and instead support real, honest reporting, please consider making a donation today.  Thanks for your support.