There are so many angles to the Deadspin story this week. Let’s spend a few minutes today on the metrics.
On Thursday, after virtually all of Deadspin’s staff quit over new owner G/O Media’s “stick to sports” edict, G/O media put out another statement defending the decision. It included:
“Non-sports content accounted for less than 1 percent of the page views on the site. Given these facts, we simply believe it makes sense to focus attention and resources on even more sports coverage to serve our readers what they want.
There’s a lot to parse here: Deadspin writers claim those numbers are false. And also if non-sports stories don’t get a lot of traffic anyway, what does it matter if they get done? But for our purposes, let’s discuss the philosophy behind G/O’s statement. The idea that a news organization needs to put its attention and resources on the content readers want.
On its face, it’s an understandable idea. It’s laudable, even. Look, this isn’t the golden days of the 1970s and 1980s anymore, when newspapers can send reporters to Africa to do a series on rhinos. The economics of news have changed. Staffs are smaller. They need to be more strategic in what they cover. Cool. OK.
One of the underrated changes to journalism in the past decade has been the emergence of analytics as a specific news value. Digital media provides us with far more nuanced and detailed statistics on what stories get read (along with when and how they are read) than we ever had in print (when the only real statistic was the number of papers sold). This means editors and reporters have incredibly granular detail on what readers are really reading. Given the economic realities of journalism in 2019, relying on them to make better decisions makes a certain amount of sense.
In theory.
In practice, it treats journalism like any other commodity. It turns journalism into selling shoes or couches or any other consumer good. It judges the value of a story simply by how many people viewed it.
And that’s simply antithetical to how journalism works best.
You can’t judge the value of a story by looking at how many people read it. At its core, journalism in the digital age is about creating, building and maintaining a community. If we want to rebuild trust with our readers, we need to look at that relationship as a community, not as a zero-sum business proposition.
That’s what Deadspin provided. It was more than a fun, insightful, snarky blog. It was a community. From Drew Magary’s farewell post:
The G/O Media statement confirmed the worst fears about its motives with Deadspin. In a weird way, this is worse than what Pete Thiel did to Gawker. That was reprehensible, but at least there was an ideology fueling it. This is soulless private equity at its worst, looking to turn a vibrant corner of the internet into another viral content factory.
Metrics matter. But when they are the sole basis for decision making, they suck the soul out of journalism.