Pulp Viral
Last week’s New Yorker asked some serious questions about the future of media in one article and inadvertently, or maybe advertently, answered some of them in a second. The first article, Andrew Marantz’s “The Virologist”, profiled Emerson Spartz a rising star of viral content. The second article was a more scholarly take on the rise of paperback pulp fiction, but somehow the two connected.
The Virologist reads as a bemusedly-critical vision of new media entrepreneurs and the “viral” content landscape. Analytics rule, headlines are constantly tested and any sense of a deeper long-term commitment to the value of content in informing or changing minds is buried in the battle for rare veins of audience attention. Spartz is portrayed as the embodiment of the anti-literary new media who grew up digesting one page bios of successful people and doesn’t “usually read straight news. It’s conveyed in a very boring way and you tend to see the same patterns repeated again and again”. Spartz’s goal is all about content reach. Using his new site, Dose.com, to create algorhythmically defined content listicles, often picked up from Reddit, imgur and other sources, and post them with testable headlines using Faceook as the primary distribution lever. One of Dose’s content producers, who had studied Journalism in college, discusses how she sees more value in the impact of a Dose listicle’s wide reach over a long, heavily researched article. Later she quotes from the Spider Man movie: “With great power comes great responsibility”.
None of this is terribly new information. Buzzfeed has been outed for capitalizing on trending Reddit content. New, young entrepreneurs come into a marketplace driven by ad dollars and find new and increasingly valueless ways to get a split second of attention. Facebook has become the primary driver of traffic to venerable news sites. In The Virologist we are presented with a practical caricature of what our new media overlords look like and where their tastes lie: “A beautiful book? I don’t even know what that means”. Ultimately the unstated question is the one we’ve been hearing for years: Is this bad? Has the Web really created a race to the bottom in terms of content? And what does this mean for journalism and writing in general?
This is where Pulp’s Big Moment in the same issue, provides an unwitting or maybe witting answer. The article discusses the rise of paperback and pulp publishers beginning in 1935 with Penguin in the UK, but more significantly with Pocket Books in the US in 1939. In both cases the driver for this new format was all about distribution. Publishers recognized a customer need for printed content that could be purchased easily and at relatively low cost. This meant changing the classic distribution method of bookstores and libraries and moving books into the new venues of wire racks at drug stores, bus and train terminals. And distribution could be achieved using an existing, robust system: Magazine distributors who could just as easily slip paperbacks into their wire racks along with the magazines they had been distributing on their routes for years.
But, as the article demonstrates, the changes in distribution led to changes in content. In order to gain the attention fleeting purchasers paperbacks needed their own catchy headline, and thus was born the now familiar pulp-fiction cover art. This was further necessitated by the fact that pulp paperbacks, while cheaper to print, worked on a fragile economy of scale that required low salaries for authors and high initial print runs, (up to 100,000 as compared to 5,000 for hardcovers), in order to turn a profit. Reprinting of “complete and unabridged” classics, with their own lurid covers, also helped create content that supported this model.
If you look at the paperback content industry at this time you can’t help seeing parallels to today’s new media content world. A great deal of pulp content was either poorly written potboilers with catchy titles and covers, meant to attract attention and to be consumed quickly, or recycled free content from dead authors. Quality wasn’t the issue, see Sturgeon’s law. The pulp distribution model rested on generating lots of eyeballs who would consume the content quickly at a low cost of entry.
Where this gets interesting is that eventually this new content format began to create its own identifiable value as it created new and unforeseen genres and formats as it attracted a broader, devoted audience. Along with the pulp and horror novels, paperback publishers were also publishing authors such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Ultimately the pressure that pulp paperbacks created on hardcover publishers led to the trade paperback. Larger sized paperback imprints that published “serious” authors and higher quality content.
In this same way, the questions we are be asking about low quality, high attention landscape of new media content might be answered by looking at how the publishing industry used a new distribution technology to build new audiences then optimize content into new forms and levels of quality. It’s not a perfect comparison, but we should always be open to the possibilities of improvement, even from Dose.com. After all, consider all the lurid cover art we have to look forward reminiscing about.
