May 30, 2013
Peak News
How mob interest is shaping the news.
For the better part of the early millennium, there was always one guy. You know. That guy. The guy who would corner you at a party, hand you a flyer in the street, or interrupt a symposium you were organizing. That guy would invariably tell you about the dangers of “PEAK OIL,” always said with the sort of missing gravitas attached by deluded people to ideas like the Illuminati and Bigfoot.
But now, in our enlightened age, peak oil is well, kind of a thing. It’s not quite the ominous danger it was made out to be, but hey, good job, strange man.
So if I may play the role of the bug-eyed friend-of-a-friend (or, wait, did he just walk in off the street?), I posit to you a theory — we are approaching peak news.
Oh, wait, sorry.
PEAK NEWS
The basic tenet of the theory goes like this: as newsrooms become ever-more able to gauge analytics, and are increasingly dependent on online revenue and paywalls, news organizations will begin to create news events at scales otherwise unimagined, creating a state of near-constant news arousal.
But there’s a way in which this is unlike PEAK OIL: this peak doesn’t descend on the other side. At least not in the near distance. (Okay, maybe it’s more of ‘plateau news,’ but that’s significantly less catchy.)
As news outlets turning towards their online platforms to build readership and cultivate an alternative to their slowly submerging print flagships, there begins a change in editorial orientation. While the old-school newsroom sought to package a newspaper that would bring in a diversity of readers — one with a strong news hook, dynamic and engaging features, a punchy editorial page, eclectic arts pieces and a flashy sports section — the newsroom 2.0 (or is it 3.0? 4.2? N3wsr00m?) is pushing out single-content packages. That is, they’re selling a story, and the related stories that are linked from it. They’re selling a frontpage. (Which is, increasingly, taken up by one or two stories rather than the mishmash of print-heavy frontpages of the past. Just look at the new Newsweek. One header. One photo. That’s it.) This new newsroom sells pithy 100-odd character headlines on Twitter, connected to a hashtag that they hope will drive them content.
This isn’t new, and I’m no futurist in telling you that things are changing rapidly.
But here is one thing that I think we’ve learned from the past two weeks — this new regime is learning the value of the dominant process story. That is, they’re finding that taking one breaking story and sucking it dry is more profitable than finding new material.
There’s two examples that point to exactly this phenomenon in Canada — Rob Ford and his supposed love for crack, and Mike Duffy and his apparent lust for taxpayer dollars.
A preface: there is no doubt that these are legitimate news stories that ought be reported as the main stories in their respective markets. That’s a given. My focus is on how they’ve rolled out, and how they continue to be covered. And the following is not a slag on any journalist or paper, because — in my view — peak news is not even a bad thing. It’s a new thing.
So consider the nature of the stories. The Mike Duffy scandal has been a slow burner — from the initial onset of the story, with the revelations that he might not actually be living in the place he (for official purposes) calls home, to the revelations that he was cut a cheque for $90,000 from the Prime Minister’s right hand man, to the Senate junta that is looking to try him. The Rob Ford snafu, however, has been a powderkeg — revelation after revelation has come out about the Fords’ ties to gangs, drugs, and even murder.
The two stories have all but dominated different circles, with overlap and intersection here-and-there. (Toronto Annex yuppies, no doubt, have little time for the scandals of the Senate but are enraptured by Ford’s ill-deeds. Ditto for Calgarian political junkies and the opposite.) But while thirty years ago this sort of interest boom in current affairs may have excited editors, pushing them to throw extra staff on the big stories while pushing to ensure that the entire newspaper package stays strong to stick in the minds of their readers, the new news outlets are much more short-term oriented. They know that, say, a Montana resident popping onto the Toronto Star is only there to read one thing — the whacky crack-smoking mayor. They’ve got to dress themselves as such. The rest of the package be damned: we’ve got a mayor to cover. That’s why you put a veritable mongol hoarde of journalists outside his home, or send journalists with full camera gear to chase down a resigned staffer during his morning jog.
News outlets in recent years have found themselves in a crowded bazaar, where, normally, everyone wants something different. Some have tried to specialize in all sorts of food and drink, while others have increasingly focused on jewellery or trinkets. Yet in the last few weeks, one of the tents was approached with some top-notch moonshine. After being mobbed by demanding customers, the rest wanted in. They started inventing their own spins and flavours on the hootch. While the idea goes that an increase in supply should simply diffuse the demand, or favour the best or cheapest in the market, something different happened — an increase in supply has boosted demand. Diversity in the market has begotten demand that is looking for variations on the product that they’ve grown quite fond of.
And that’s what’s happened on the web. Gawker broke its Ford story, to a whirlwind of publicity. The Toronto Star, otherwise not ready to go to print, found itself lacking a massive chunk of the market, so rushed to print. The rest of the market, naturally, jumped into the fray. But rather than finding that the story became dry, the constant onslaught of social and traditional media tag-teaming the story actually boosted interested and skirted news fatigue. It became in a feeding frenzy in the way that a story certainly would not have been even a year ago. Papers followed the IndieGoGo Crackstarter obsessively, they camped outside the Mayor’s office, they dispatched reporters to follow up on every lead possible. The Globe published (probably in a rush) its 18-month investigation. Foreign news outlets published crazy-things-Rob-Ford-has-done lists. Society could talk about little else. One poll showed that over 95% of Toronto had heard of the story, a number hardly conceivable.
Would this story still have been big in 1995? Of course. 2009? Absolutely. But in 2013, this story got doused in gasoline by a conspiring convergence of forces — but most of all, it was driven by pageclicks.
While papers spewed out content as fast as they could on Ford, there was relatively little they could do when it came to creating breaking stories. What else can you do, other than try to get in with the Somali drug dealers.
That’s why the Duffy story is the other half of this.
It is pretty much a truism in Canadian politics that there are, at any given time, hundreds of brilliant ‘scandals’ just lurking plain sight. This may be said of virtually any institution, but Canada is perhaps the biggest discrepancy between number of journalists (at least, journalists who dig through legislation, archives, spending reports, etc) and the amount of data in an institution. Some get found, some don’t. C’est la vie.
That, I think, is part of the reason that we tend to focus on a scandal for a short period and move on. Nothing really sticks. Journalists dig up little scandals (Bev Oda’s orange juice, for example) and move on. Some scavengers might show up and pick at the scraps, but that’s mostly it.
On this Senate affair, it’s a different beast. And it’s not because this, at least at the outset, was a particularly big scandal. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Senate scandal began as a rather pedestrian endeavour. But, as it turns out, it was a profitable outing. Canadians love spending scandals, and they do not particularly care for the Senate. What’s more, the regionalist aspect of the wrongdoing — not many scandals originate in PEI — made for some good localized traffic.
So the media stuck with it. Certainly, there was something to stick to, but the coverage of Duffy, beginning in 2012, was dogged. Journalists dug and dug, and every few days there was a new Senate story. And, as in the new norm, they all piggybacked off each other. The news continued and multiplied and it became its own trending story, as it were.
So when CTV Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife uncovered that the PMO cut Duffy a cheque, it was clear that the news wouldn’t be ending yet. It was just beginning.
Ford, too. Every time it seems that either story is on track to lose steam, something new happens. As I write this, curiosity is swarming over the accusation from an anonymous source to the Toronto Star that Rob Ford not only knows about the video, but knew its location. This after the Globe and Mail revealed that the video’s original owner may have been gunned down for its ownership. Duffy, meanwhile, is accused of having hosted a CBC show while claiming Senate expenses.
These two stories are sucking out the oxygen from everything else. Maybe for good reason. But consider this: last week, self-styled radical Islamist terrorists attacked and beheaded a British soldier in the middle of the street. The Canadian media barely noticed.
Arthur Porter, one-time Harper watchdog and still member of the Privy Council, was arrested in Panama for fraud. A few heads turned, but most of Canada remained unperturbed.
Two NDP MPs were caught not paying taxes. Only the Tories appeared to know or care.
So this is peak news. The meiosis-like division of news where stories slowly mutate and change shape, quickly reproducing and smothering all other news stories. It’s the type of news that our consumer model wants — one where they don’t have to learn about a new story ever day, but rather one where they can get updates to the one that they read yesterday, then go back to watching cat videos on BuzzFeed.
This model isn’t a bad one. Where we once thought investigative journalism may be facing a shotgun blast behind the woodshed, it now appears as though there is a market for it, if the story is right.
And while the other stories may not be getting the publicity as the flagship news article of the week, there is always a need to report and foster other news to round out websites and fill physical column inches.
But peak news does mean that news becomes more tailored to the tyranny of the masses. That’s not a terrible surprise — as soon as we figured out how to quantitatively measure what the unwashed peasants wanted to read, that was a logical conclusion.
The big danger is this: can we resist the urge to succumb entirely to public demand, not only increasingly supply, but changing the product itself, cutting it with cheaper material or significantly marking up the price?
It’s a quandary. And we might need a few more drug-taking mayors before we figure out where the balance is.
