Ads-based news is poisoning us all, and here is why
A short guide to understand why you’re feeling so uninformed.
A few weeks ago, Italian institutions have passed a new law on children being accidentally abandoned in cars. The new law forces family with young children to provide their cars with devices able to perceive unusual presences of human beings and sends an alert to an app parents are supposed to download.
And at this point you might be wondering why this story ended up in a blog committed to journalism, media and their vices and prejudices.
Well, I strongly believe this law and the whole discussion about it is a direct consequence of the problems we’re going through in journalism and -consequently — in democracy. In Italy, in Europe and all around the world. But let me explain why.
A matter of business model.
Firstly, let me begin with a topic that could sound disconnected from this story, but is actually a central aspect to me: business model. You definitely don’t need me to know that the vast majority of media companies and journalistic networks have been relying on ads to earn money since the Internet became popular.
Relying on ads means that the user/reader/audience is not required to pay, as an advertiser will pay for him/her to put a commercial on the webpage and call for his/her attention.
This business model has created multiple problems, as also explained by a masterful piece on The Guardian. Why? If readers don’t pay, then they are no longer customers, but products. Sounds creepy, doesn’t it?
Three problems.
First, it’s a matter of independency of the press, as explained by Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator at The Telegraph. When the HSBC scandal occurred, in fact, his newspaper decided not to cover the story consistently.
“The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Telegraph is a fraud on its readers” he wrote on Open Democracy. “HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend” Oborne added.
Second, it’s a question of money. As a number of authors such as Pierre Rosanvallon and Daniel Bell suggested, our world is de-ideologized. Newspapers are of course paying the fee of a more and more politically neutral world, as they historically used to be strongly related to certain parties or political ideologies.
Nowadays, most of the times users reach a specific news site not in light of their own political opinions, but thanks to a wise SEO strategy and digital presence (social media, for instance) implemented by specific media companies.
Consequently, media companies do not perfectly know who their readers are and can’t efficiently target them with the ads they put online. Or, at least, they can’t as good as Google or other companies can.
And guess what? It’s not good news, because advertisers need media companies every day less than the day before, and their willingness to pay sinks down in the ocean.
The third element is absolutely crucial to me. I’ll call it traffic addiction. As click-generated revenues go down, news sites need more and more traffic on their platforms.
They need to generate traffic by being fast in the content they provide (before the competitors’ is better) and smart at selecting the stories to tell. They need to offer what you’re asking for, not what you actually need to know. And this is the origin for huge troubles.
As a matter of fact, they don’t care about how accurate and double-checked that news is, how news-worthy that story is, how fair that headline is.
They need traffic, no matter the cost.
How do they generate traffic?
One of the most powerful techniques to generate traffic on their website is reporting on sensational stuff. It could be a shooting, an accident, a tragedy or something related to extremely positive or negative emotions. For example, a zebra trying to wake up its dead pregnant partner (see how many emotion-related words there are in this piece) or human-looking dogs (again, a lot of emotions).
They have to talk about emotions rather than data or facts, and this is what media companies fundamentally do.
And after that, they have to do some good old clickbait, that never fails. You know, something like “YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED” or “MEET THE GUY WHO ALMOST KILLED…”, or again, “HE JUST DIED, NOBODY REMEMBERS HIM”.
That gets a lot of traffic (even if someone is organising a digital resistance movement here, thank God).
Scary consequences.
But then the question is: how long can they prolong this agony? How long can they keep on neglecting people’s intelligence and need of real and serious information? And, most important: what are the long-run consequences of such a bad journalistic behaviour?
I think one of the answers to the third, fundamental question is: “the law Italian institutions have just passed”. In fact, when you need to get traffic on your website and you begin with that silly cat stories and making emotions the centre of your storytelling, you end up describing the world as a terrible place.
“News is about the weather, not the climate” noted Rob Wijnberg (The Correspondent) on Medium. And that’s true. The news fails at providing us the context we need to understand what is going on.
The news is about the terroristic attack, not about the reasons why someone in Europe radicalized and joined ISIS. The news is about those terrible parents who forget about their children in the car, letting them die in inhuman conditions. And we all get disgusted, afraid and — sorry to tell you — uninformed or misinformed.
The truth is that in Italy less than 10 children have died abandoned in a car over the last twenty years. That means less than one case every two years, in a country home to 60 million.
Is this a real emergency? No. Is this a perceived emergency? Well, look at this graph and give yourself an answer. Please, look especially at how often people’s attention come back to the topic. It always happens when (for some reason) journalists cover a similar story.
Believe it or not, most Italians (and Italian families especially!) are happy to be forced to pay for these new devices that tackle the brand new emergency of our times. But don’t blame them: they’re not stupid, they’re just misinformed. They truly believe that parents forgetting about their children is the problem because the news has said so.
Even worse, some data for you. In America, terrorism causes less than 0,01% of the overall deaths, even though half of the US population are worried about it. Its media coverage is extremely over-represented and race-oriented, as two graphs by Our World in Data show.
Similarly, the world is becoming a safer place to live in, as psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in one of his books.
Did you ever imagine that? I personally didn’t.
What does low-quality and click-oriented journalism mean?
So, politics eventually end up making laws on non-problems, fake emergencies and false priorities. The society ends up following misleading headlines and non-doublechecked contents. We, as citizens, end up living in the fear and losing track of what is really important to us as individuals and as a society.
And that’s all because of a mouldy business model that Jeff Jarvis described as “the house on fire” here on Medium.
Guys, ads-based journalism is not and cannot be the future, and the sooner we’ll get to understand it, the better it’ll be for the society we live in. Which is actually the only thing journalists should be taking care of.
