A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Why Journalism Isn't Conveying the Threat to Democracy

It's not just both-sidesism. It's also how journalists' jobs have
been compelled to dumb down

This week's Altercation guest author is Caitlin Petre, an assistant
professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, who has
recently published a book called All the News That's Fit to Click
.
The book, which examines how audience metrics are reshaping journalism
in the U.S., originally came to my attention from a review in Jacobin

by Victor Pickard, who noted, "In short, we ignore news media's
death-by-metrics at our peril."

To Improve the News, Focus on Journalists' Working Conditions

By Caitlin Petre

The U.S. press has come under fire

lately for failing

to take seriously the increasingly authoritarian flavor of right-wing
politics-and its attendant threats to our democracy. Much of the furor
is justified: When one of the two major political parties is becoming
fundamentally anti-democratic, journalists' long-standing affinity for
"balance" inevitably benefits

the would-be autocrats. And if journalists are doing key parts of their
job badly, we can (and should) condemn that, loudly.

But we also would do well to think about why that might be the case.
What's driving the media's current failures?

Many critics point the finger at traditional journalistic norms, and
with good reason: Some of the problems are baked into the professional
values and habits of U.S. journalism. Newsroom ethnographers as far back
as the 1970s observed that journalists wrote with two aims in mind: to
avoid being accused of political
bias and to impress

other journalists. Both tendencies persist today. Skittishness about
being seen as biased resulted in the both-sidesism that too often
characterized coverage of Trump. Meanwhile, coverage

of the Build Back Better bill exemplified journalism's insular
tendencies, providing a play-by-play of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten
Sinema's objections rather than explaining the legislation's actual
content and its implications for Americans.

Looking at journalists' professional values and habits of mind can
help explain why the news so often falls short of what democracy needs.
But it is not enough. We also need to remember that journalism is a job,
and journalists are workers. In their book

on creative labor, cultural sociologists David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah
Baker argue that "bad work"-that is, work that is boring,
insecure, isolating, excessive, or poorly compensated-is more likely
to produce poor-quality cultural products. Unsurprisingly, the opposite
is true of "good work"-work that is fairly compensated, secure,
autonomous, and interesting. If we want to understand why journalists
are creating so much news that is of so little civic value, we need to
look closely at the conditions under which they labor.

As a sociologist interested in how journalism is changing in the digital
age, I spent years doing just that. For my book
,
All the News That's Fit to Click, I conducted observations and
interviews at The New York Times, Gawker Media (before a lawsuit forced
it into bankruptcy), and Chartbeat, a tech startup that specializes in
creating real-time web analytics for newsrooms. I found that digital
journalists are often subjected to the kinds of production quotas and
work speedups that are more typically associated with a factory floor or
call center. This intensification of news work is facilitated by the
spread of analytics tools like Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Quantcast, and
Google Analytics, which make it possible for managers to calculate
precisely how much traffic each writer is bringing to a news site in the
form of page views, unique visitors, minutes the readers spent, and many
other measures. These tallies increasingly influence the way
journalists' work performance is evaluated: High traffic can tee you
up for a bonus or promotion, while persistently low traffic might
jeopardize your job.

Rather than resist this kind of data-driven labor discipline,
journalists often get hooked on the roller coaster of validation and
disappointment that these real-time analytics provide. Many become
devoted-even compulsive-players of what I call the traffic game,
pushing themselves to work ever harder to beat their own traffic records
or those of their colleagues.

How might these working conditions make the news worse? The easy answer
is what we might call the Clickbait Explanation: Traffic incentivizes
journalists to produce content that will "do numbers," and such
content tends to be heavy on cats and Kardashians and light on
substantive stories.

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But the Clickbait Explanation assumes that journalists know exactly what
kinds of stories will garner traffic. The truth is more complicated, as
I learned when I interviewed and observed journalists at Gawker. Working
under intense time pressure and beholden to the whims of the mysterious
and ever-changing Facebook algorithm, Gawker writers expressed a lot of
uncertainty about what, exactly, would attract high traffic. As Andrea,
a writer (who, like all my interviewees, has been assigned a pseudonym),
put it, "Anyone who tells you they've uncovered the secret to
virality is probably a bullshitter."

Writers buffered themselves against these uncertain, high-stress
conditions by pushing themselves to produce an ever-larger volume of
posts. On sites with large audiences like Gawker, virtually any post was
guaranteed to get at least a few thousand unique visitors, thus
contributing to a writer's monthly tallies. And a few lucky posts
might even become traffic "hits." Eddie, a writer, compared his job
to playing the lottery: "You pick your numbers and you're diligent
about it, and the more lottery tickets you buy, the more likely you are
to hit it big."

High-volume posting had consequences for Eddie's mental health; he
told me he regularly talked to his therapist about traffic. It also
presented a major opportunity cost: "[Traffic] compels me to produce
more," he explained. "However, producing more, blogging more,
keeping the post count up necessarily means that I don't take time to
work on the longer, slower, reported-out features." In other words,
the traffic game discourages journalists like Eddie from creating the
kind of thoughtful, context-rich reporting that might help audiences
make sense of political and social complexities. In addition, as media
scholar Mike Ananny has argued
,
a healthy public sphere needs journalists who can offer not only speech
but also space that allows people to listen, absorb, and reflect. With
its relentless emphasis on novelty and quantity, the traffic game
punishes the kind of strategic silences that could enrich civic life.

Eddie is not alone. In recent years, scholars and journalists alike have
lamented the rise of "churnalism
"
or the "hamster wheel
" of
digital news, under which journalists are asked to produce more and more
content with fewer and fewer resources, and thus end up over-relying on
press releases, wire copy, or aggregation. Increasing media
concentration
and the
growing share of media companies that are owned by hedge funds and
private equity firms
,
which tend to be laser-focused on short-term profits, have only made
matters worse.

There's no doubt journalism is due-frankly, overdue-for a
reckoning about how its norms, values, and practices could better
support the diverse democratic public it purports to serve. But
relentless production pressures, enforced by traffic metrics, make it
all too tempting to cling to some of the profession's worst habits. In
order for journalism to take the kind of "pro-democracy
"
direction that many press critics are calling for, working conditions in
the industry must improve.

There are reasons to be hopeful that such improvements are possible. The
shift high-profile news organizations have made toward subscriptions in
recent years seems to be easing daily traffic pressure in those
newsrooms (though questions remain about whether this model is widely
scalable and how it will affect the socioeconomic and racial diversity
of news audiences). Another bright spot is the wave of unionization that
started with Gawker in 2015 and has since swept through dozens of
digital newsrooms. With bargaining demands that range from pay scale
equity

and diverse-hiring initiatives

to the outlawing of traffic quotas
and
guarantees of editorial autonomy, many of these unions have demonstrated
an understanding that newsroom working conditions and the civic value of
news are inextricably linked. Anyone concerned about the current state
of news, and the future of democracy, should take note.

If you want to hear more from Caitlin, here

she is on Brian Stelter's CNN Reliable Sources podcast.

Odds and Ends

So today is my birthday. It's not a big birthday. It doesn't end
with a zero or even a 5. But for the past few years, I've been
utilizing one of the few non-evil aspects of Facebook to ask people to
contribute whatever they can to an organization that reflects my values
as well as any: T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights (formerly
Rabbis for Human Rights). If you want to learn more about them, here
's the group's website, here
's their donation page, and here
is
my Facebook page in case you want to give them money and make it look on
evil Facebook that I have generous (sheesh) "friends."

Finally, in keeping with this week's birthday theme, here
are The Ramones with Mr.
Burns; here

is Marilyn Monroe with JFK; here

and here

is Loudon Wainwright III; here

is the great Stevie Wonder singing to Martin Luther King Jr. (whose
birthday is the day after mine), and here
are
Bono and the Edge singing it too; here
's
B.B. King; here
's
Jimi Hendrix; here
's
Elvis, and here
, of
course, are the Beatles! (Collect and save for all your "friends.")

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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