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Politico has a great story out today about “the fall of Salon.com“; a look at how a once cutting-edge, and thought-leading, online magazine jumped the shark for clicks.
The story raises a number of issues about the state of media, the Internet, and society.
Back in 2000, Salon was a huge deal. I remember when friends and I were preparing to launch an online boycott against Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who was outspokenly anti-gay and had just been given a new TV show by Paramount. We needed a top media source to announce our launch, and we gladly turned to Salon. The story, by Salon’s Donna Ladd, helped explode interest in our campaign among the media and the nascent online grassroots. Ladd’s coverage, as the top story on Salon’s home page, was a god-send to our campaign.
Fast forward to 2016.
Salon, like the rest of media, is desperately trying to become profitable. Even those of us who make a profit, find it increasingly difficult to maintain ad revenue and traffic. So what do you do? You go in seek of clicks, readers, traffic.
The way ad revenue works is, more or less, you get paid based on how many people visit your site, and how many pages they visit on your site. And sadly, there may not be a direct relationship between the quality of your content and the quantity of visitors. There’s a reason the Daily Beast recently promoted a story on “vagina massages,” and I doubt it had little to do with women’s liberation. It’s likely the same reason that Salon publishes stories urging the FBI to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and urging Sanders voters to support Donald Trump. They’re less interested in quality journalism than they are surviving financially, often at the expense of their original mission.
While I’m disappointed in Salon, I also understand their financial constraints. And in some ways, it’s the readers’ fault, at least in part. When I write about a horrific hate crime against a transgender activist in Pakistan, my story doesn’t get a lot of readers. But when I write about Bernie Sanders dissing the AIDS community, or a video that appears to show Sanders embracing a homophobic rapper, the story gets 30 times the traffic of the trans story.
I saw the same thing when, in the same evening, two stories came out at nearly the same hour: the verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial; and the death by drug overdose of a “Glee” star. I wrote about both. The Glee story got 5 times more traffic.
And finally, there’s a third problem with the quality of journalism, and it’s linked in part to the financials. The media is hiring younger and younger writers and TV personalities in order to appeal to a millennial audience, as a last-ditch effort to remain relevant and viable. (Younger people also have lower salary requirements than older folks.) But with that youth and beauty comes a lack of experience. Facebook’s Zuckerberg may think young people are simply smarter than their elders, but they’re often not as good at what they do as someone with more years’ experience. Good writing and good thinking, like any specialty, takes years of experience to learn and perfect. And, even then, you continue to get better with age.
I see publications like Ad Age regularly publishing interesting-sounding digital-age stories that read like a college kid wrote them (and it wasn’t always that way). Salon has fallen into the same trap. In order to woo angry and sometimes-naive millennials, Salon has hired far too many angry and sometimes-naive writers. That’s not to suggest that there aren’t good millennial writers and thinkers (Mic’s Gabriel Arana is one), or some good writers at Salon (Amanda Marcotte comes to mind). But when you place a bet on youth over experience, it’s only a matter of time before you end up jumping a shark.
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