clicks

what must journalists become, in a fracturing media world?

I sometimes take these photos as proof that I do, in fact, put digital ink on digital paper. Also, as proof of the perfectionist bent of Ukrainian manicurists.

It’s hard to pinpoint when it happened, that “doing it for the clicks” became the go-to jab against journalists. Just at some point, as the public became aware of the growing importance of digital readership metrics to the media business, a suspicion settled in that page views — or “clicks” — is what all journalists chase, what we crave.

To be sure, all media outlets look closely at readership metrics. Some give them more sway than others; I’ve read worrisome behind-the-scenes accounts of the pressure to make successful posts at a few online media outlets. Journalists have enough sources of stress trying to make our work both correct and good; having to also worry about whether that work is popular can sabotage those first two priorities. Stories that get the most online traction aren’t always important in any wide public sense; they just provoke the strongest emotional reactions. Sometimes that matters, sometimes not.

Still, it’s a myth that all or even most reporters are fully consumed by those numbers. For me, a staff writer at a unionized traditional news outlet, clicks are meaningless, at least in any material sense. Sure, it’s emotionally rewarding when folks like one of my pieces enough to share widely — its nice to have one’s work acknowledged positively! — but that’s the sum total of what “clicks” do for me. They don’t make me money, or improve my job security. Whether my stories are read by thousands, or just a few, my life and career continues more or less the same. Retweets and likes — or, excuse me, “social media engagement” — are even more materially ephemeral.

But the idea that clicks are the primary driving force in modern journalism persists, and it rests on a secondary misunderstanding, which is this: many people still think that soaring page views alone keep journalism afloat. They don’t. What’s worse: it’s still not clear what does, or what will, and very few outlets have figured it out.

It’s difficult to adequately describe just how deeply the last two decades broke the revenue model that once sustained thriving journalism, from small-town papers or television stations right up to The New York Times. I’m not enough of an expert to break it down to the nuts and bolts. But it comes down to this: digital ad revenue is worth pocket lint compared to what traditional advertising used to be worth, even with big readership numbers. And to regional outlets — like the Free Press — that simply cannot draw millions of readers, there’s no way to survive on that revenue.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at what’s been happening.

Around the mid-2010s, when newspapers were visibly struggling, a common public explanation was that they just weren’t making themselves relevant to the changing times. Unsympathetic critics often pointed to a thriving online media sector, led by outlets such as BuzzFeed News, which launched in 2011 with an obscenely talented stable of young journalists. Outlets which never considered paywalls, and sought to make their business work through “clicks,” subsidizing serious journalism with the frothier entertainment content that brings big views. It seemed to be working.

Well, until it didn’t.

This month, Buzzfeed News shuttered its entire operation, closing down a Pulitzer-winning newsroom that had broken some of the most important stories of the last decade. Vice, once touted as an edgy media voice of the future, filed for bankruptcy. Now, they join an increasingly crowded graveyard of high-profile digital outlets that have shuttered: as it turns out, big clicks were never enough to keep journalism alive. It was always the infusions of venture capital funding those outlets enjoyed.

Meanwhile, legacy print media outlets have almost universally turned to paywalls. We know readers don’t like them much, but subscription revenue has shown, for now, to be more sustainable and valuable than digital revenue on free page views. (One of the most fascinating shifts of the last two decades is the sense that “news should be free.” Before the Internet, you always had to pay for the newspaper.) And while most legacy outlets aren’t as sexy as the digital start-ups, and are now a shell of what they used to be, at least they’re clinging to life. For now.

So the challenge is to figure out how to get people to pay for news, and how to find a model for journalism that works: one that works for readers, for journalism workers and for the good of the societies it serves. It’s an open question, and while all sorts of models are being tossed around, including non-profit, nobody really has an answer.

That scares journalists, deeply: “It goes down to the bedrock of journalism as a career — even as an idea or desire,” Tajja Isen wrote, in a sharp piece for The Walrus. “What are journalists, both would-be and employed, supposed to aspire to now?”

Those words, I think, perfectly summarize the problem at the level of production: it’s hard for journalists to see a road forward. I’m outrageously lucky in this regard, since I got in at the last possible moment one could realistically imagine job security in this business, and even then I’ve been laid off twice.

But further on Isen’s thought: there is one path to which journalists can aspire. It’s an exciting one, but also worrisome, and that brings me to what I’ve been thinking about this week, and what I really want to say.

It’s a myth, I think, that people don’t want to pay for media. The issue is what inspires them to do so, and that’s what outlets have been trying to find. We’ve tried appealing to a sense of public good, and while it’s true that a healthy media sector is necessary for a healthy society, I can’t blame people for not feeling too moved by the plea that they should pay for news because it’s the moral thing to do. Good content matters, of course, and ensuring invaluable reporting will turn readers into subscribers. But for a broad-based Canadian news outlet, it’s difficult to become that indispensable behind a paywall, when the CBC can publish competing online news in every market for free.

Yet I’ve noticed one clear trend, in where people want to pay for media. Not just want, but are happy and even eager to do so: it’s platforms like these. It’s Substack, Patreon, or social media. It’s podcasts too. It’s independent and often individual efforts, where subscribers have a sense of direct connection with the creator, and most of all, feel as if they are in a conversation with that person.

This new, more independent model enabled by platforms that connect journalists and content creators directly with their audience is, in a way, exciting. There are reporters and columnists who do exceptional work on these platforms, and have built that work into a very good (and deserved) living wage, and to be honest I just love all the various people I subscribe to. But there’s also a shade to this trend that scares me.

Let me put it this way. Many nights in Kyiv, I hang out with other foreign journalists, mostly freelance. Some of them are doing well here. Mostly, those were reporters who were here at the start of the full-scale invasion, when the global demand for Ukraine news was insatiable, and they built reliable connections with editors at that time.

Many of those who came later, though, find that it’s incredibly difficult to find paying work, no matter how quality the reporting. Recently, I was chatting with a friend here, who has amassed a wealth of diligently-reported stories and found few buyers. What I told him is that, in my honest opinion, as legacy media budgets shrink to nothing, the future of freelancing will increasingly be in self-publishing.

He asked how I’d been able to build my Substack audience. Truth is, I didn’t have any good advice. The Free Press gave me my first platform; that’s how most of you found me, and many of you followed me to this writing oasis. I don’t promote this newsletter very much, because I don’t have to, and more than that, I don’t want to. Sure, it would be nice to have more subscribers, and maybe make a bit more pocket change on this unpaid leave. But what would I have to do to find them? Who would I have to be?

Building an audience independently is really difficult. Having good work is the first part of it; but you also have to be willing to constantly, aggressively promote it. You have to be comfortable with being that visible. You can’t just do the work and hope the work speaks on its own; you have to always be finding new ways of getting it in front of new audiences, so that they can consider subscribing to you.

Here’s a part where I keep writing things, then deleting them, because I don’t want to sound bitter, or make this a critique of any one person in particular. But I have seen, both in Ukraine and elsewhere, how some content producers — I can’t in good faith call them journalists, whatever they call themselves — have built a fervent audience covering events or ideas ways I consider irresponsible at best, and disturbingly self-aggrandizing at worst; ways that would never pass muster at any established outlet.

What those people do tend to be good at, though, is the personality part of the work. They’re bold, they’re very outspoken, and they’re very good at promoting themselves as the source of information, the person you know will be talking about a given topic. Their audiences are loyal, and will defend any of their more outrageous actions with a fervour normally reserved for family; these are para-social relationships.

More than anything, I notice they don’t seem to have the same kind of self-doubt that haunts most journalists I know, who are largely reluctant to put themselves front and centre, who feel a constant tension between their public work and private life. It takes a certain personality and unbreakable confidence to weather the social media storm of self-promotion; is that instinct to make yourself a focus, and comfort in that position, always the most compatible with doing good journalism?

Look, I’ve been incredibly privileged, and lucky. The structure and stability of the Free Press has long insulated me from having to enter that sort of arena. I don’t have to be a character to succeed; on my sabbatical, when I could be trying to build a readership independently of the Free Press more aggressively, I’ve found that I really don’t want to. I don’t want to expose myself more than I already am. I don’t want to be a brand; I don’t want to always be selling myself to new strangers or finding ways to get my face and words on their screens. I just want to be me.

But every year, legacy media dwindles, flayed closer and closer to the bone. Every year, more quality digital outlets fold, having lost the faith of the venture capitalist funders. The more those platforms retreat, the more the media landscape becomes pitted with holes, and the fewer journalists find an institutional path to a living wage.

In that emerging world, there are incredible opportunities for journalists to do it on their own: to do good work, and connect directly to people willing — even excited — to pay for what they produce. But what worries me about where that’s heading is who that new dynamic most favours — and who it could push any of us to become, should we want to keep working in this wounded world called journalism.

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What I’m Reading

• Okay, the best thing about journalism in the digital age is how it can so seamlessly blend visual and textual elements to make the reporting deeper, more explanatory and more compelling, like this phenomenal NYT investigation into why a swanky apartment complex became a death trap, in the catastrophic Turkey earthquake.

• When the dying stops being scary. A poignant piece by Kyiv Independent reporter Asami Terajima, who I was grateful to meet shortly after this piece came out; puts how soldiers handle life at the front into stark relief.

• “Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter.” A fine New Yorker essay by Prince Harry’s ghostwriter that opens a rare window on the work of ghostwriting, the most ubiquitous literary job that we all collectively pretend not to see.

• I’ve long had a soft, nerdy spot in my heart for Titanic facts — I wrote about its emotional resonance in my life once — so I was ecstatic when analysts released the first-ever complete 3D map of the wreck, featuring remarkable levels of detail. Very cool.

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One Photo, One Story

On Saturday night, I took myself on a walking date through the city, ostensibly to go to a music festival that I already knew was sold out, but mostly because I just needed some time alone with the cobblestones and the breeze and the trees.

That night, Kyiv was as alive as I’ve ever seen it. Young people and families thronged Kontraktova Ploscha, the vibrant square in the heart of the old Podil neighbourhood. Patio bar patrons spilled onto the streets. There were buskers, break-dancers, horse-drawn carriages. A cacophony of music and laughter to escort the sun to its sleep.

The Ferris wheel sits in the middle of the square. I’d first seen it in January, when Ukraine’s electrical grid was grievously wounded by Russian attacks, and it was lit only by a lone floodlight attached to a growling generator. But it was winter, so nobody was spending too much time outside in Podil anyway.

Now, the neon constellation of the wheel’s lights light the square, and for the first time I noticed the sign. It delighted me that not only was the thing labelled simply “Giant ferris Wheel,” but that the only word not capitalized was “Ferris,” which by English rules would be the one word that would demand the capital.

One of my favourite parts of travel is savouring how flexible English rules can be, in regions where it isn’t dominant. Ukraine isn’t nearly as fun in this regard as Japan — where English is used in public signage here, it’s usually grammatically correct and always fully comprehensible — but the tiny quirks one does find make me smile. Language is a playground, and never more fun than when imperfectly enjoyed.