JOURNALISM IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS

The quality of journalism had been challenged in recent decades by the advance of social media and the internet. Increasingly, the need to make media pay has decreased serious content, reducing so-called news reporting often to over-sensationalised and panic-inducing reports to aggravate addictive followings. How to manage, if not push back against ,this mechanised take-over of public affairs has been Claire Lehmann’s mission ever since she began her internationally recognised Quillette blog. To explain why she did it, how it has worked and what next, Claire Lehmann spoke for The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 22 March 2023.

JOURNALISM IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS

CLAIRE LEHMANN

About a decade ago, I noticed a problem affecting journalism. Leading broadsheet newspapers were starting to publish a type of journalism that was of a lower quality than they had traditionally done so. It wasn’t immediately clear what the reasons were for this. But it was my suspicion that the Internet had something to do with it. This low quality journalism was typified by online verticals such as Fairfax’s Daily Life, and American platforms such as Gawker and Jezebel. Some headlines from these platforms included: “I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry,” and “How Accepting Leggings as Pants Made Me a Better Feminist.” I never intended to become a journalist. In 2015, I was training to become a forensic psychologist. But articles like the ones I’ve just described aggravated me so much that I started writing about them. I created a blog and wrote articles which debunked the facile arguments they were making.

At some point along the way, however, I realised that I wasn’t actually arguing against a set of ideas. I was making an argument against a business model. I realised that the publishers of this low quality content were not producing journalism as it is traditionally defined, they were in the advertising delivery business. When a publication relies on advertising revenue, it doesn’t matter if a piece of content goes viral because everyone hates it or is outraged by it. The revenue accrues regardless. In this business model, quality, which is more expensive to produce, is a liability.

In the mid-2010s, the big platforms such as Google and Facebook changed the editorial direction of newspapers. Because the architecture of these platforms rewards content that is hyper-emotional, anger-inducing, and demeaning of the out-group, content that serves these functions tends to do better. Because the platforms reward this type of content, publishers are incentivised to produce more of it. This is not simply an intuition. Data also support this view (at least in the US). A study published in October last year, led by a New Zealand team, showed that headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness had all been increasing over the past two decades, whereas joy and neutrality had decreased. The team looked at 23 million headlines from 47 news outlets in the United States and analysed them for an “emotional payload” across a 20-year period. In that time, headlines that denoted anger had increased 104 per cent, fear increased 150 per cent, disgust increased 29 per cent and sadness increased 54 per cent. Headlines that denoted neutral emotional content were found to have decreased by about 30 per cent. Similarly, headlines denoting joy have also decreased (after increasing in the mid-2000s). These trends were found to be bipartisan.

The study found that although these trends existed prior to the Internet and social media, there was a particular inflection point around the year 2010, when these trends accelerated and amplified. What happened the year prior? Facebook introduced the “Like” button and Twitter introduced the “Retweet” button. They had introduced virality into the media eco-system.

Someone who founded a much larger and more successful company than I did in the mid-2010s recently reflected on what he learned from becoming a publisher in this fast-changing environment. The co-founder of Vox Media, Matthew Yglesias, explained the dilemma faced by publishers wishing to use platforms for distribution in his Substack newsletter. To do well on Facebook or Google, he writes, meant “bending to the editorial vision of a different company.” Yglesias writes that “people to this day underrate the influence of these companies on the structural properties of the content you consume. Everyone complains about having to read through a few hundred words before getting to the recipe you wanted. But that was because Google gave priority to recipe pages that were structured like real articles. Then there was a time when the big news organisations were structuring lots of stuff as live blogs because Google was giving priority to live blogs.”

The problem with trying to earn money through online advertising is that each ad-impression is worth so little, that it doesn’t make sense to run ads unless you are likely to receive millions of impressions. And to receive millions of impressions means that one has to conform to the parameters of the platforms that distribute content. Yglesias observed that dependence on these platforms was editorially constraining. He writes:

The huge shift in media sensibility that happened during this time was absolutely not what editors and senior figures in the industry wanted to see. Even in retrospect I don’t really understand why this was the case, but objectively speaking, hard-core identity politics and simplistic socialism performed incredibly well on Facebook during this period. That doesn’t mean journalists started pretending to be left-wing to get clicks. But people who had some authentic left-wing opinions found that writing on the subjects where they were the most left tended to generate the most traffic, and early career journalists with authentic leftist views outperformed their colleagues. So, you ended up with this whole cohort of discourse structured around “Is Bernie Sanders perfect in every way or is it problematic to vote for a white man?” as the only possible lens for examining American politics and society.

This shift in sensibility in the media was alarming because it suddenly called into question the leadership of editors and publishers. Why were they allowing such poor quality content to be published? Did they not care about their brands? Did they not care about the reputation of their profession? All of these questions are valid and legitimate questions to raise in response to poor quality journalism optimised for advertising revenue. But as Yglesias explains in his reflection, the reason this happened was because editors and publishers had been usurped by Facebook and Google.

Quillette was founded in 2015, as a counter balance to these trends. I wanted to create a space where we could publish thoughtful, long-form commentary that was analytic rather than emotional, and sober rather than sensationalistic. At first, I was incredibly excited about the prospect of new media. The Internet made it possible for green entrepreneurs such as myself to start publications from scratch and reach audiences around the world with very little upfront capital. By very little, I mean very little. One can register a domain name for $20 and set up company social media accounts which distribute content for free. Unlike in the past when legacy media companies had a monopoly on distribution, the Internet and social media platforms created an environment where a thousand flowers could bloom.

In 2018 and 2019, just a few years after founding Quillette, we were getting three million page-views a month. It was an incredible reach for a website produced on the cheap. One big data analysis found that we were the 14th most influential website in Australia – measured by how many international websites were linking to us. Our articles didn’t necessarily go viral, but we did publish a high volume of essays that grappled with problems that the larger legacy media institutions seemed too timid to touch. We criticised hardline identity politics just as it was becoming ascendant in legacy media, scrutinised anti-scientific philosophies in the academy, raised the alarm bells about gender interventions in children without a proper evidence-base, drew attention to “cancel culture” and excesses of social justice activism long-before the term “woke” had become well-known, and published well-respected academics and intellectuals that for one reason or another did not find themselves welcomed into the mainstream. All of this gave us an international reputation.

But looking back, I was perhaps just a little too idealistic. The incentives that drive the new media environment are the same as the incentives that drove traditional media to embrace “angertainment”. Over the years, I have watched as peers and colleagues in new media become more angry, more partisan, more emotional and less analytical. It’s not hard to see why. When your angriest, YouTube videos are the ones that go viral, it makes sense to keep producing more.

I remember the first time I heard the term “attention economy”. I found the term repulsive. But, unfortunately, the term is apt. What we have on our algorithmic social media platforms is not a marketplace of ideas, or a public square. What we have are gladiatorial arenas where people fight over who is granted the most attention.

Like the media platforms I described earlier, these platforms are also in the advertising delivery business. We are saturated with content. It doesn’t matter how niche your interests are, whatever you are interested in, the Internet has something for you. In many ways, this is great. If I like nature photography, I can connect with people all over the world who share my interests. I can join chat rooms, forums, see photographs on social media, follow famous photographers and watch videos about how to improve my photography on YouTube. But when it comes to politics, the endless amounts of content mean that political commentators must compete with each other for attention. To win this competition, one must appeal to the most primal aspects of human psychology.

What do I mean by this? Well, for most of our history, we lived in small communities or tribes. We were often threatened by neighbouring tribes. Those who alerted us to threats, especially threats from alien tribes, were highly valued. It paid to alert and to be constantly scanning our environment for threats. Over the years, I have observed that people who are addicted to social media live in a constant state of anxiety. They are constantly scanning their environment for threats. Popular new media personalities fulfill a role where they constantly alert their audiences to potential threats, either to themselves or their in-group’s status.

Checking social media today, I found that the tweets that were going viral were predicting hyperinflation and the collapse of the US dollar. During the pandemic, Americans were hyperventilating over apparent “concentration camps” in Australia. Every day there is a new panic, or calamity. Every day there is a new reason to get worked into a frenzy over.

This is not a partisan phenomenon. Different flavours of doomerism are promoted by activists of all political persuasions. The Left’s doomerism manifests in fears about a climate apocalypse, whereas segments of the Right, particularly in the United States, indulge in paranoid fantasies about totalitarian world governments. It is easy to get sucked into this information eco-system and to let its dynamics dictate what you spend your time writing or reporting on. But I believe this is a mistake. A journalist’s primary responsibility is not to spread alarm, panic or endless stories of impending doom, no matter how popular this style of content is, or how much revenue it brings in.

A journalist’s primary responsibility is to fairness and accuracy, and the ethical standards of the profession. Social media engagement and commercial success must always be a secondary concern. The problem for many in new media today is that they are both entrepreneurs and journalists at the same time. I know from experience that these two roles conflict. This conflict can be managed, but far too many pretend that a conflict does not exist.

The Internet has created corrupting incentives for journalism, but it has also created opportunities for innovation. Somewhat ironically, the most promising innovation in terms of journalism’s future has been the one that returns the business model to the past. That is the business model of subscription. The path back to sanity for journalists is to make an audience valuable by charging them to read. In increasing the value of each individual reader, the perverse incentives created by advertising business model are neutralised.

It took me some time to learn as a publisher that revenue does not necessarily correlate with website traffic. These two metrics can be completely unrelated, and one can create a sustainable and thriving business that is self-generating, without even looking at traffic statistics. Which is what I do today. And I’m not the only one. Newsletter platforms such as Ghost and Substack have allowed specialists to reach niche audiences who are happy to pay good money to support their journalism. These past weeks during the meltdown of three banks in the United States and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, I have been reading various newsletters written by finance specialists. The beauty of specialist journalism is that there are no word length requirements, and people can be more technical than they otherwise would be in a newspaper or general audience magazine. The potential for the public to read deeply on complex topics is unparalleled.

The subscription model has not yet taken off in Australia like it has overseas. But the opportunity is there. Regional journalists covering local issues would benefit from establishing subscription newsletters. Journalists covering technical subjects or special interest cultural topics that are too niche for our largest newspapers would benefit from creating small publications that pool talent and resources. The beauty of the subscription model is that one does not have to reach a mass-market in order to create a viable business. In fact, the more niche the subject matter is the better, because subscribers like to support material they know they cannot get anywhere else.

What is also encouraging is that the journalists who are doing very well with paid newsletters are not necessarily the ones who are going viral on Twitter with doomerism or outrage. Letters From an American is a newsletter created by a history professor in Boston named Heather Cox Richardson. She looks at contemporary issues in American politics from a historical lens, and she earns over $US5 million per year from her subscriptions alone. Other journalists who have successfully monetised independent newsletters include Matt Taibbi formerly of the Rolling Stone, Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, Matthew Yglesias, formerly of Vox, and Andrew Sullivan formerly of New York Magazine.

In Australia, News Corp recently surpassed one million paid subscribers, which is an astonishing milestone. And more and more Australians are paying to access their news.

So, there are many reasons to be optimistic about journalism. There appears to be no shortage of good material to read, and organisations and individuals have found a business model that works. My main concern as a consumer is that too much great material being published, and there is not enough time to read it all.

The upside of the subscription model is that journalism is thriving, but the downside is that quality information is now somewhat of a luxury good. And this “information inequality” is likely to exacerbate other forms of inequality over time. While there is no shortage of good material, there is also no shortage of garbage, and the volume of garbage is likely to intensify thanks to artificial intelligence. At the same time, however, as the volume of malicious content ramps up, discerning audiences will come to rely on trusted brands who have a track record of authenticity.

In some ways, I think we are actually entering into a new golden age of journalism, but this has only occurred because journalism has de-linked from social media. While social media still drives traffic to websites including paid newsletters, the paid subscription model means that news organisations and independent journalists do not have to rely on this traffic for revenue. The more that news organisations can skirt around social media altogether, the healthier the information ecosystem will become. Ultimately the only way to win the social media engagement game is not to play.