We Were Never Supposed To Read This Much News

I am a newspaper reporter so I know something about this industry. I know what my grandmother means. It’s true: social media and the TV are full of alarming reports that end is near, yet the end never comes. 

Never before have we been so constantly exposed to so much information. It can fill our minds and drive us crazy. 

For the sake of our intellectual and emotional well being, it’s important to learn to navigate this new reality of the information age, especially during unnerving times when the world seems in danger, we’re cooped up all day just staring at our screens, constantly pushed to the brink of psychological collapse. 

The news media is not an exclusive class. Anyone can take part. We journalists have nothing more in common except that we work in the same industry. We don’t conspire. We don’t usually even like each other. 

I went to work at a newspaper after college where I made $30,000 per year to do a high-pressure job. It started early in the morning so readers could have something to look at when they woke up and grabbed their phones. It lasted into the evening as we sent the next day’s paper off to print. We had to pay $1 per cup of coffee that we drank in the office. 

Every day I took fire from our readers who, hiding behind the anonymity of online comments, regularly accused me and “the media” of trying to fool them, to push some grand global conspiracy. They wanted me to know they could see through my magic. 

But I wondered if they knew that I was 24 years old and lowly paid, or that part of my job was writing about zoo animals and new chicken restaurants that opened.

They called me “the media,” as if all the fringe blogs and small town newspapers held meetings with the national newspapers and TV stations, from leftwing to rightwing, to coordinate our conspiracy. When they denounced “the media,” they meant all media but their preferred media.

News reporters are not a ruling class. We’re a cross section of society. There’s no secret about how to join this industry. Any can do it. We aren’t all working together. 

There is just one thing that all of us are forced to try to do: get you to read our work. 

If the news is free, it’s because it is funded by advertising. That means the website gets paid per pageview or “click” (often about $0.01 per). 

If that’s how the website makes its money, then it will do what it can to draw you in, often using drama and sensation. But clearly we must be weary of what we are given for free. 

Some people have never paid to subscribe to a quality publication, so they don’t even know about the serious news. 

Really, there is nothing that journalists would like more than to abandon the ad-driven, click-based model to write for subscribers who are willing to pay to read serious content. 

Inside every newsroom are editors and reporters glued to screens of live analytics showing how many readers are reading which stories at any given moment, how much time they spend on the page and even how far down they scroll. 

Most news outlets these days make much of their money through advertisements on the page, which pay per pair of eyes that see them. Everytime you scroll past an ad on a news page, the publication earns money. That’s why publications need to draw as many clicks as possible. 

Writers and editors are always looking at their stats to determine what works and what doesn’t - what readers click on and what they don’t. When it doesn’t draw clicks, editors say, “less of that.” When it does, they say, “more.”

Every journalist has the depressing experience of spending weeks reporting and writing a deep, meaningful and complicated story that draws a few hundred clicks, then spending 30 minutes making a slideshow about poop that goes viral. 

Lesson: digital news media is a democracy. Your click is your vote. 

In reporting school we are told: “Journalism is like a mirror society uses to see itself. Without it, things get ugly real fast.”

As we said before, “the media” is not “them,” it’s “us.” As a society, we have a news industry. It is our mirror. 

We as a society will behave like a person when we look into this mirror. Which of us, when we look in the mirror, is not inclined to dwell on the negatives? To search for and identify our faults? Isn’t that the first step to improving ourselves?

Perhaps only the most enlightened of us, the most peaceful at heart, would see their own image and find nothing to bemoan, nothing to celebrate. And who among us believes our society today is one of the utmost enlightenment and peace?

Also, the frequent news reader should wonder how much time it is healthy to spend staring at the mirror each day. 

The news was never meant to be the only type of literature you consume. The news means short reports, written and reported rapidly to tell readers what is happening as it happens. It is, we journalists are taught, “the first draft of history.” It is a genre of crisis reports. It’s what we read only when there is no second draft yet. 

You want a deep and nuanced understanding of a complicated world? Web articles are not where you will find it. 

If you want to know about the people and episodes that made the world this way, read nonfiction books. If you want to know about the human tendencies that have driven our history, read fiction books. If you want to know about the deepest of truths that can barely be written -- the ones at the hearts of religions -- read poetry. 

But don’t read web articles, written in a few hours, days or weeks, then raise your voice because the lowly paid author didn’t impart a clear and holistic impression of our times.

The news is now a commercial product like any other. Publications give people what the market research surveys say they want, and online data shows which stories consumers read. It’s up to all of us to set a higher standard, and to put our money down for what we think is important. 

Dylan Baddour, Intelligence analyst for Sibyllic. Previously: reporting on Colombia/Venezuela for WaPo, WSJ, Reuters, BBC y más. Before that: Houston Chronicle, PolitiFact TX.