The world of journalism is convulsed with matters of online traffic—how to get it, how to keep it, how to measure it. Traffic is the new circulation, and is considered central to the slow and uneven migration of the advertising-revenue model from print to digital. And just as the circulation equation can produce strategies that detract from the quality of the journalism, the traffic equation must wrestle with those same pressures—but in a different arena.
Competition for eyeballs is exaggerated in a media environment where content is carved into ever-more specific slices and readers are acculturated to graze. Two strategies for corralling readers that have always been part of the press’s competitive landscape—titillation and scoops—are also exaggerated in the digital world. On the titillation front, the wasted airspace that infects cable TV news has moved to the Web. On any given day, CNN.com or MSNBC.com or Foxnews.com, as Jack Shafer recently noted in Slate, feels compelled to deliver—prominently alongside reports out of Kenya or from the campaign trail—stories such as girls gang-raped, forced to be sex slaves; video: trains turn car into fireball; granny locks boy in cage, says he poisoned her, and so on. These get eyeballs, of course, but at a cost.
Meanwhile, if genuine scoops in the digital age are a good thing, the new notion of being first is more complicated, and at its worst, becomes a full-scale surrender to the idea that just because the Web makes it possible to publish constantly, you must. Being “in the conversation” can mean multiple posts a day, no editing, and little reflection. We’re not disputing the evidence that indicates publishing quickly and regularly brings traffic, any more than we would argue that a two-thousand-word explainer on the delegate-counting process will outdraw coroner’s deputy: as body hanged, i...
Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.
