Against “Content”

Not long ago, I shuttered a successful blog. Here’s some of what I learned.

Remember “blogs”?

I started blogging in 2003. It was a niche form then, into which I jumped to supplement a nascent career. I did so largely because it was clear, even 10 years ago, that the gatekeepers were losing grip. I wanted in on whatever was coming next.

I struggled at first, dabbling in politics and culture but finding little traction. That changed in 2006 when I launched The Loss Column, a site devoted to covering Baltimore sports (primarily the Orioles). It started slow but eventually found an audience. At the peak I had hundreds of daily hits and earned links from places like Yahoo Sports, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post.

For several years I owned the #1 spot for a google search on “Baltimore sports blog.” In 2011 I won a “Best of Baltimore” from Baltimore Magazine. The site was successful.

The fact that I lost money didn’t matter. Indeed, it was a conscious decision.

I experimented early with advertising but nothing made sense. Nobody clicked banner or sidebar ads (surprise!) and I didn’t have the desire to play an AdWords game. I decided instead that every post I put up (thousands total) would be driven by one goal: trying to make something my audience would want to read.

As a result, The Loss Column paid me back several times over.

I shut it down recently because I realized I didn’t have the personal bandwidth to continue that goal of making it worth my readers’ attention. That, and it had run its course.

Now, for the first time in a decade, I don’t have a regularly updated, traditional blog. This has me looking at the arc of my experience and considering what I’ve learned.

Mostly, it’s this: no more “content.”

The idea of “generating content” didn’t exist in ‘03. Most people writing or posting their art online did so because they had something to say. It was messy, for sure, but it was also quite real and quite exciting.

Eventually, the space shifted and became a giant, yawning bucket. It started to demand filling for no reason other than that it was empty.

Saying something began to take a back seat to the need to simply say something.

Thus, headlines like “7 Beauty Products You’ll Probably Never Need.” Thus, click-bait slideshows. Thus, blogs that recycle news stories and pass them off as new just to keep the front page fresh.

We’ve entered a world of good and talented folks flailing before and, ultimately, withering in service of the misguided idea that having large numbers of people read something is more important than whether or not it’s actually worth reading.

When “content” first emerged I didn’t have a problem with it. I saw it as a catch-all, a functional way to describe things people and businesses created to serve their needs. That can still be true, depending on who’s using the term.

Too often, though, “content” cheats the fundamental purpose of communication, which is to convey something of interest and/or value to a party one might reasonably believe will want to hear it.

This isn’t a treatise against the Internet, advertising, marketing, or social media. It’s not anti-business. Indeed, note what I say above about the purpose of communication. That thought accommodates advertising as easily as it accommodates a letter to a friend. It accommodates Twitter as easily as it accommodates the novel.

Rather, this is a statement against the fact that everywhere I look I see people and businesses devaluing themselves and their work in service of a master nobody loves or needs.

The act of communicating to an audience is, if not sacred, important. You’re making a big assumption when you say, “I have something that is worth your time and attention.” This has always been true but it’s never been more true than today, when attention and time are both at a premium.

To approach that act with anything other than respect is, in the best case, misguided.

When you think of work as “content” and not as what it is — writing, photography, film, advertising, reporting, whatever — you are violating a contract with your audience. You’re saying, “You’re not worth real effort, you’re just an eyeball I need to reach, on the way to a click I need to generate, on the way to a metric I need to prove.”

So, enough with “content.” Enough with filling space just to fill space. Enough with tricks, games, and misdirection.

Enough with cynicism.

Audiences deserve respect. It’s time to start working harder to make things that will actually matter to them.

It’s probably also time to slow down and embrace the sacrifice of larger top-level numbers in favor of smaller, but more valuable, numbers at the ground level.

In the long game — the only game all of us are truly playing — it’s better to spend more time on less than less time on more.

If we call that “content” for the purpose of convenience, fine.

If we call that “content” because that’s what we really think we’re creating then, well, we’re probably not actually creating anything.