Our Gullible Media: How the singular pursuit of traffic makes online media suckers for fake news

[salvorhardin]

The speculation frenzy Bloggers have to churn out dozens of posts a day. A recent lawsuit filed against Reuters revealed that bloggers were required to write more than eight posts a day, and clock as much as 20 hours a week of unpaid overtime to do it. Bloggers have repeatedly told me that their daily quotas hang over their heads and influence almost every publishing decision they make.

Their editors have made it this way. GigaOm founder Om Malik brags that he’s written more than 11,000 posts and 2 million words in the last decade. When even the boss is churning out three posts a day, you know that the pressure is real.

As a result, no topic is off limits, no source too sketchy, no story too speculative if it will result in an extra post. Veteran bloggers John Biggs and Charlie White put it well in their book Blogger Bootcamp, when they reminded aspiring bloggers that there is “no topic too mundane that you can’t pull a post out of it.”

People like me have incredible luck getting coverage just by sending fake, anonymous “tips” to bloggers about the things we want them to write about. No one has the time, and few have the interest, to verify before publishing. Michael Arrington, who parlayed dubious scoops on his blog TechCrunch into a $25 million acquisition by AOL, said it himself: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.” You can’t tell me it’s not easy to manipulate someone so transparent about his self-interest.

Full article: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/media_manipulator_ryan_holiday.php?page=all

Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, sounds interesting too.

You’ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.

I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs—as much as any one person can.

In today’s culture…
1) Blogs like Gawker, Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post drive the media agenda.
2) Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines.
3) Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see and watch—online and off.

Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I'm tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I'm pulling back the curtain because I don't want anyone else to get blindsided.

I’m going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.

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Link: http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/159184553X

[brewens]

1. We get this same effect with recruiters at our blood center. Their director demands that

the schedule is full way in advance. She even wants the whole year filled by February. The only thing is she's not all that picky about what gets scheduled. So what happens? To get the boss of their ass our recruiters fill the schedule up with anything they can.

Even blood drives where we've been beating a dead horse for a couple of years get put on there. As long as the business owner or manager says okay, it gets put on the schedule. So then we have it booked solid and when we are contacted by someone worthwhile, there is nowhere to put them in the near future. Someone that's really stoked and has great prospects of getting us a good turnout and we have to put them almost a year out if they want a particular day of the week. It's insane.

[salvorhardin]

2. I hear you

I think it's an underlying disease in our culture -- the pursuit of "more" -- more pageviews, more traffic, more widgets, more bodies, more money. The irony, of course, is that "more" is not the same as "better" but it's often synonymous with "worse." In the media, this is highly visible. We constantly chasing more eyeballs, but those eyeballs don't pay, and as a result there's fewer people to produce quality journalism.

[salvorhardin]

3. Afternoon kick

Good stuff. Learn how the media, right on down to your favorite small-time bloggers, are manipulated.

[HiPointDem]

4. media not gullible but complicit.