Does a website's voice matter?

To start, a question for you to think on:

How often do you get news by going to a specific website?

And by that I mean, how many times do you open a browser, click in the address bar, type ww.(INSERTPUBLICATIONNAMEHERE dot com) and then hit return and go to that site?


In the aftermath of Deadspin’s collapse last week, one of the questions going forward is what happens to the site. Not just the individual writers, but to the site’s spirit. But what happens to that thing, that spark that made Deadspin Deadspin?

In the most recent episode of The Flip Side, you can hear me struggle with this idea. On a recent episode of The Press Box, David Shoemaker talked about Deadspin’s value being its editorial voice, and that’s the perfect way of saying it. Deadspin’s value comes from its voice, that combination of snark and what founder Will Leitch called earnestness to a fault.

But that very idea of a website’s voice raises an interesting question: How much does that matter now?

Think back to that question from the start: How much news do you get directly from websites? How many times do you open a browser, click in the address bar, type www.(INSERTPUBLICATIONNAMEHERE) dot com and then hit return and go to that site?

Obviously, this varies from person to person.

But if you’re like me, you probably find yourself deliberately going to fewer websites and getting more news from social media, RSS and aggregators. .

If you’re like my students, you are definitely like this.

This is the idea that Hermida coined years ago of ambient journalism, where news is just kind around you all the time. It shows up on our Twitter feeds. It pops in our phones as a push notification. It’s suggested for us in Apple News or Google New.

When news is all around us and coming at us in a variety of platforms, does the voice or tenor of the specific website matter? In a way, it feels like our reading habits are centered around a series of free agents rather than dedicated websites. We follow writers whose voices we love, whose work we respect, but thanks to digital and social media, their home base is less important.

Put it this way: I’m not a Bleacher Report reader, I’m a Tyler Dunne reader. This isn’t meant to diminish Bleacher Report and the support they give their writers. It’s the reality of my reading habits. I follow writers I like, regardless of where they are writing, much more than I follow sites with a voice I relate to.

To use my favorite site as an example, I don’t know that The Athletic has a specific voice to it. I don’t think people subscribe for the point of view of the site in general as much as they do for individual writers or coverage of teams. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation.

But I think it’s a potentially important observation and lesson to take from what G/O did to Deadspin.