My turn!
I have been thinking about An Article I read about a month ago that introduced me to the term "Hit Board", which I found out, is a public record of how many pageviews or "hits" every single article has, on the the videogame-journalism site Kotaku, The article focuses on Kotaku's new EIC Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo), his philosophy on journalism in gaming and how his website measures success.
Apparently, with this site and all subdivisions of Gawker, Kotaku's "parent" blog, the content producers use the "Hit Board" as a tool to help tailor their future content to what is most popular and what got the most pageviews because essentially, these articles got the most advertising views.
Tailoring content towards the masses seems like a dangerous concept to me, because of what the general population seems to value in today's instant-gratification, change-fearing, reality-TV/celebrity obsessed culture that we've created.
This creates an atmosphere where contributors to the website would steer away from writing a potentially interesting, engaging story about something no one has heard of yet, and instead choose to write a puff piece about something already popular just because it's guaranteed to drive high traffic.
Kotaku is a good example of this degradation in quality of content already. Articles and editorials about videogames and systems released months (and even years) ago are being written and posted on a daily basis, because the writers know that established fans will read a familiar article about something they like, as opposed to an article about something foreign to them.
This is a dangerous system for journalism to operate under but it seems like one of the only business models that is proven thus far, at least, in the realm of online media.
Popular = Hits, Hits = Ads, Ads = Money, Money = Success!
One might argue that journalism should never be concerned with what's in or what sells, but in order to operate an actual media outlet that can pay its employees and continue to do business... It will need to bring in revenue somehow.
For content producing sites, is there another business model that can or will emerge? Will subscriptions or paywalls emerge as profitable options? Are people even willing to pay for premium content? Or will our content producing journalistic media be forced down a dangerous path of writing to appease the masses?
Only thing I can say for certain is... It's a damn interesting time to be a Creative Communications student.
-NxB
Playing: Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet
Watching: The Office
Listening to: Childish Gambino - Camp
Journalism needs to be concerned with what sells -- unless you and all other contributors plan to work without pay forever.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't advocate that.
But you are right that interesting, important and challenging journalism often does not attract instant audiences.
Therefore someone has to invest in publishing it, and therefore someone has to pay.
Agreed. It seems like the content producers of tomorrow are going to find a new Quality:Quantity balance.
DeleteIt's not going to be easy.
If the only thing that gets published is what's popular - it would be Honey Boo Boo 24-7. God help us all!!!!
ReplyDeleteWe're almost there. I saw a link that said something along the lines of "Honey Boo Boo Weighs In On Gay Marriage"
DeleteNot even God can help us out of this one.