The pursuit of digital readership at the New Republic

It's a good view but fairly one-sided. I think the digital transformation also showed some pretty severe flaws underlying the model of journalism. I can think of at least these:

1) When the entertainment and information alternatives are much poorer the bar is much lower. Newspapers were used to this and then the internet raised the bar quite high. Whereas a bunch of friends might get their banter on by reading a sports newspaper at their bar they may now get a steady stream on twitter, or read a specialized blog if they're nerdier, or...

2) We romaticize journalism way too much. These days if I want the reality of the government budget I'll more easily head online to a specialized blog or read the well organized state stats page than read the newspaper. The newspaper article on the same thing is often wrong, sometimes comically so (e.g., missing the scale of the national debt by a factor of a 1000). If we get to topics I really know about I'll definitely get much better information, and a nice discussion to boot, in a specialized forum like this one than in a newspaper. And these kinds of places pop up more and more.

3) The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the published laws explaining things, running through government spending and explaining where the problems are, and a million other things that are now easy to do because the data sources are available. The closest they come is doing "factcheck" articles which are nice to try and keep politicians in check but are an extremely biased source of news. I don't want you to be driven by whatever the current soundbite is, I want you to drive the news cycle by picking the things that actually matter to people, running through them methodically and reporting on that original output.

Pointing towards the current US president as an example of how journalism shows its worth seems shortsighted. The challenge of Trump is what they are actually setup to do. Challenge a few shallow narratives and keep pushing until things unravel. It's the actual challenge of educating the population on important topics that I don't see a way for journalism to get enough resources to turn around and actually do. But maybe I was expecting too much from it.

>Data have turned journalism into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, calibrated. Perhaps people in the media have always thought this way. But if that impulse existed, it was at least buffered. Journalism’s leaders were vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business

I understand the author's frustration with the current state of affairs but let's be honest, the only reason journalism was not an aggressively marketed "commodity" in the past is because competition was lower. 40-50 years ago very few people could afford to own and operate widely circulated newspapers/magazines. You could write anything you liked and you would have guaranteed readership, the public had very few options. But as we saw in the 80s/90s when printing and distribution became cheaper and more widespread the public turned more and more towards tabloids, gossip columns, sensationalist stories and partisan viewpoints. Nowadays there are millions of sites offering more or less the same content and the only way to stand out is to be even more aggressive, viral, sensationalist, tabloid-esque than the printed tabloid era.

The problem is not data driven content, the problem is that everyone has access to the same "stories" and the ability to publish it. Go to New Republic website right now and see what the main stories are: Trump, even more trump, the dnc, game of thrones, some bs liberal article about police/sexism/hollywood, something about instagram, etc.

What insight will you get if you read the n-th article about the latest Trump antics or the i-th article about sexism or social media? Does it matter if the author is an intern at buzzfeed or an journalist with 30 years of experience? You won't get any wiser on the subject even if the author is Ernest Hemingway. The content is now trivial and no amount of good intentions, idealism or journalistic craftsmanship is going to help you.

Want to stand out and not be tormented by "data"? Find a niche and write about specialized subjects that few can write about. Trivial subjects are a mass consumer commodity and there's no turning back

The Atlantic itself, where this piece was published, had its own rocky transition to the digital world. I was a longtime print subscriber, and around 2012 or so I found that the cover of the book was becoming more and more offputting. Not the art, but the titles of the articles. They were deliberately provocative, to the point of being irrelevant to the actual content. Clickbait without the clicks. I got so tired of that, along with the shady antics of their subscription department, that I eventually stopped renewing my subscription. By shady antics, I mean requiring a credit card for subscription renewal, so they could auto-renew you every year thereafter. I had been happy to send a check for several years' worth of the Atlantic in advance, but I'm not going to sign up for automatic charges to my credit card. Their attempts to grow or at least maintain their subscriber base cost them my subscription.

Has the NR ever made money? It seems that for the first ninety or so years it was owned by people who had made their money elsewhere and (I infer) at best broke even.

Good article, but the title is misleading. The article itself shows that new leadership made poor decisions, "had an addiction to real estate in prime locations, and top tier consultants." Those are poor choices in a dwindling market, and show the relative youth and inexperience of the leader.

I do feel journalism will eventually recover, as we will always need information. What will have to happen is the strengthening of new revenue models. "Free plus adverts" has not worked for many journals, and where it has worked, it has led to clickbait and fake news and all sorts of other travesties.

We used to pay to buy newspapers and magazines. We may have to do so again.

The standard assumption is that you need to make money through advertising which favors maximizing clicks and page views over quality. But at least in a number of cases, thought(ful) leadership by platforms is overlooked as a source of serious journalism. Goldman Sachs and McKinsey put out a lot of free research because this thoughtful leadership help establish them as an authority for their main business.

An article about digital readership.... from the site that complains about my ad blocker so I can't read anything even if I turn it off.

Sigh.