Journalism and content in the time of "tronc"
I sit in front of a computer for 40-45 hours a week as a digital content producer for a local TV news station.
There's a reason I'm a digital content producer, not a digital journalism producer or a digital news producer or even an online editor.
It's because what I am doing is not news. It's "content." And it's the way executives (many of whom are not of a news background) think that media organizations are going to stay alive.
I took this screenshot of my web site today, shortly after I came in for my 2:30 p.m. shift. I didn't publish any of these stories--the guys who work a day shift did. But these are the stories living on my website. None of them local. Maybe some of them news. But all of them "content," and all of them clickable.
Jon Christian of Slate summarized the idea of "content" well in a recent article discussing the implications of Tribune Publishing rebranding itself as "tronc," meaning "tribune online content."
...publishers use the word content to imply connotations of journalism without taking on any of the procedural or ethical expectations. The goal of journalism is to be accurate and as objective as possible; the goal of content, generally speaking, is to rack up page views for cheap, or perhaps to sell you something.
I am responsible every day for keeping our website updated and for sharing stories on social media. When I share those stories, am I keeping the public informed about important things? Occasionally. Am I highlighting the important work that our award-winning reporters are doing in the field? Sometimes. Am I also trying to drive web traffic back to my site so my news station can keep making money?
That's what content means.
Let me be blunt for a minute.
What are people more likely to talk about on Facebook? A well-researched local story about dangerous lead levels in a city government building, or a story from another station about a man who put his penis into something unnatural? Will people click on a local crime story, or a nationally-trending story about an alligator eating someone? Will they spend their time on my website for a story one of my reporters poured her soul into, or a non-local piece about some guy who set his house on fire with his wife and kids inside?
It's the sensational stuff every time. People love it. They click on it. They share it. They comment on it. It could be a story from the entire opposite side of the country that took me all of two minutes to put on our website, but if it's salacious or scary, it's good content.
Television is not in the same boat as print journalism is, but it's on a boat that is struggling to stay afloat. Hence, my directive from higher-ups is pretty simple. Unless you have breaking local news, you need to focus mostly on getting people to come to our website, where we have companies paying for ad space, so we can keep paying our bills as nightly news ratings hover in the basement.
Thus, o people of the Internet, your time and energy is money to me. Your clicks ensure that I will have a good day at work and that I don't have to worry about my news director--a hardened veteran who has been in this business before the age of content--calling me into his office and asking me why the web numbers are down on my shift. I post crappy stories because crappy stories get clicked on.
Content means I think about a shooting in our city in terms of metrics before I think of it as someone's life. Content means more people work in online-only publishing than in newspapers, according to data released today.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Content means I spend more time writing about alligator attacks and abusive parents and grisly murders than I do writing about the city where I live, work, and pay taxes. Content means I am essentially wasting the money I spent on my journalism degree to spend my time generating...well, more content.
I am 25 years old. My undergraduate journalism degree is valued at roughly $130,000. I was a newspaper reporter before I turned to the web, thinking it would be a fun, exciting, lucrative job. I knocked on doors. I made phone calls. I stood in the street as police worked the scene of a fatal crash. I dug through public records. I pissed public officials off. I sat in almost every City Council meeting a small town had for three years. I was a journalist. I did stuff that mattered.
Before I left that little paper, I was beginning to see the rise of content. I was asked to stop attending all those City Council meetings--no use in spending my time on something people never read online, right? I made my headlines sexier. I cheapened my craft a little bit to make the higher-ups happy. I looked at ever-changing metrics about what stories were doing the best on the website, and what ones weren't working. I worked on my brand.
The paper was Gannett-owned, and I left in the middle of their "Newsroom of the Future" restructuring and their rebranding of TV and digital assets to TEGNA--basically, so they could pour all their time and effort into media that actually made them money. The New York Times has made a similar shift.
Television is dying a slower death than newspapers are, and web sites are increasingly becoming a trusted source for news--or should I say, content? Thus, that is the basket into which Gannett and the Times and the Tribune and other bastions of journalistic integrity are throwing their remaining eggs.
And maybe that's why people with no journalism experience are making decisions for news organizations--because the hardened journalists just can't stomach what our industry is becoming.
