Scholar’s Stage would agree with the “does not hate you, nor does it love you” bit, but has a somewhat different take on it; the space of possible narratives would be limited even in the case that the writer didn’t care about advertising revenue at all
[The] need to reduce reality to a simple mental model is an inherent feature of human cognition. For the most part it is done automatically without much thought. We cannot avoid simplification—we speak of London doing this or China doing that not because such simplifications are true (there is no unitary agent named “London” or “China” doing anything) but because it is impossible to act in a complex world without such short cuts.
The problems of journalism are the problems of cognition on steroids. For the journalist, historian, or social scientist, the drive to reduce is acute and explicit. On top of the normal simplification we all do unconsciously, nonfiction writers must reduce twice more: The first round of reduction comes with investigation. Any subject is too large to be understood in toto.
The investigator must decide where to focus her efforts, how to spend limited time, what sources to consult, what questions to ask, and what sort of evidence to be on the lookout for. Many of these things are not explicitly decided, but are forced upon the investigator by the nature of her tools and sources or by her preconceived sense of what is notable and what is not.
The second round of simplification, just as inherent to the journalistic enterprise as the first, is built into act of writing. The investigator has collected in her brain more that can ever be put on a page. Journalists in particular must condense what they have learned onto a very small space. This double reduction process is often described as “framing” a story. Reducing an entire movement—the histories, controversies, disagreements, defeats, glories, and quirks of thousands of unique individuals—to one comprehensible frame will always cut important things out. It is inevitable that some members of the covered group will be dissatisfied with the frame they have been forced into.
This process, far more than any explicit ideological agenda, is the source of most bias in journalism. This source of bias cannot be escaped. Stories without a frame are just an incoherent collection of facts too long and too varied to fit on a page. The bias imposed by framing is necessary—and sometimes even a good thing. [...]
The trouble comes when attachment to a given frame leads journalists into misperceiving their subjects, forcing them into a framework that does not really fit them. If you are primed to think of internet subcultures through the gamergate frame, gamergate is all you will ever find. In the terminology of the rationalists, it is a problem of “priors.” All that was required for a mess like this was a writer with wildly different priors and tight time demands to come into contact with a community they only had a superficial understanding of. No active malice is necessary.
And while he does note that the NYT explicitly wants particular narratives, he also mentions that the incentives involved are a bit more complicated than just going after advertising revenue:
This idea that the New York Times published things for “the clicks” is common but inaccurate. Vox publishes things for the clicks. The New York Times, like other top tier publications such as The New Yorker or the Washington Post, make their money from subscriptions and side services—like that high school trip to Peru that got a certain Times reporter fired. The New York Times is rolling in dough, and that dough has nothing to do with the virality of any given article. In fact, there is a good chance that uber-viral articles cost them more readers than they gain from them. No one subscribed because of 1619 or the Cotton op-ed, but a lot of people did unsubscribed because of them!
Likewise most writers, regardless of publication, care very little about their hit count. At most publications individual writers are not even told site traffic stats for individual pieces. Only in rare cases is payment tied to popularity. What motivates writers and journalists is not clicks but prestige. They measure their self worth through the esteem of their fellow writers, and write to that end. For more on this see my post “Why Writers (And Think Tankers) Feud So Viciously.”
I agree that advertising revenue is not an immediate driving force, something like “justifying the use of power by those in power” is much closer to it and advertising revenue flows downstream from that (because those who are attracted to power read the Times).
I loved the rest of Viliam’s comment though, it’s very well written and the idea of the eigen-opinion and being constrained by the size of your audience is very interesting.
Scholar’s Stage would agree with the “does not hate you, nor does it love you” bit, but has a somewhat different take on it; the space of possible narratives would be limited even in the case that the writer didn’t care about advertising revenue at all
And while he does note that the NYT explicitly wants particular narratives, he also mentions that the incentives involved are a bit more complicated than just going after advertising revenue:
I agree that advertising revenue is not an immediate driving force, something like “justifying the use of power by those in power” is much closer to it and advertising revenue flows downstream from that (because those who are attracted to power read the Times).
I loved the rest of Viliam’s comment though, it’s very well written and the idea of the eigen-opinion and being constrained by the size of your audience is very interesting.