Biting the hand that commissions…
Seven days ago Sam de Brito wrote an excellent column for the Sun-Herald on the lack of news values in some websites. You can still find it on the smh.com.au website via this link, should you desire.
De Brito posed the question: “When did ‘what was on telly last night’ become news?” He then pointed out the types of “alleged news story” he has problems with. Dr Mumbo couldn’t help but wonder how the smh.com.au would itself fare in the days that followed (and that went before). Let’s have a look…
Dodgy news story 1:
“There’s a new Apple product! This used to be called an ad. A queue of 35-year-old virgins outside a shop is not news; 40,000 people lined up for rice and water is.”
Just proves Sam’s point doesn’t it? It’s also a clear indication of the state of newspapers these days – they can’t survive without celebrity dross and journalists are either too resource poor or too lazy (or probably both) to to actually do proper journalism.
Trawling Reddit for news is the worst. Just so lazy – and they want you to subscribe and pay for it! News.com.au is the biggest offender here. Just look at the home page on any given day and count the celeb stories vs real “news” stories.
At least they keep that hard hitting journo with the odd name Staff Writer busy…
Advertisers wanting to pay less for ads and get more page views per ad would have nothing to do with this right?
If you are infatuated with page views (because that’s all advertisers care about), you will go for the lowest common denominator. Why is the SMH website so tabloid? Because they are competing in a digital world that pays no premium for quality content.
This “hard hitting” editorial that we all anguish about is not sustainable. At $5 per ‘000 how many people need to be interested in a thoughtful piece about climate change (that was horrifically expensive to produce). Do the maths. Two ad slots per page. $10 revenue per ‘000 page views. Lets say it cost $5k to write the story, run it past legal, find images etc etc.
To get my $5k back I need 500,000 page views of that one article.
It’s all about the eyeballs broseph….. The internet does not recognise premium content, nor are consumers prepared to pay for it.
Who has time to trawl reddit, Twitter etc every day. Readers want to go somewhere they can catch up on all the news, both hard and soft. I’m not sure when Sam de Brito become the arbiter of what is and isn’t news – perhaps he should concentrate on his own columns.