What Makes You Click?

Charlie: Ah...the battle for clicks. McClatchy CEO Tony Hunter has what probably seems like a brilliant idea in the board room of his California publishing company, where someone should jump up and drive a wood stake through its heart. It seems the McClatchy executives believe that “performance metrics” should be based on numbers of clicks per story at its many newspapers. Then that would be one of the factors used in deciding raises and the like. Here is why that is a terrible idea. There will be big numbers of clicks on hard crime stories and soft features about people who get sacred messages from their pets at Christmas and Easter. Anything about the complexity of life, or the difficulties of government, well, those will not get big numbers. In fact, if you wait long enough, this kind of attitude will completely transform the definition of news from “what just happened that didn’t happen a minute ago” to “whatever makes people feel warm and cuddly.” Newspapers are not supposed to make people feel warm or cuddly, same for other media outlets that present news. What you want are stories that make people shout, “Oh my Gawd, my pants are on fire!” because their pants are actually on fire, not because someone making pants wants to unroll a new line of fireproof slacks. Hopefully, they will make some money in the process.

I have been way around the block on this subject, having worked for the Chicago Tribune when it was getting webby, Encyclopedia Britannica when it was getting webby, and a couple of other places between them that were always dreaming of ways to enhance circulation. At the Tribune, after joining the paper from a stint in Moscow with UPI, I was assigned to write a regular column called “Neighbors Who Care!” I tried. I really did. But all I got were a lot of ideas from scam artists or the self-interested who wanted recognition. My friend, the columnist Dorothy Collin, figured out the best way to label it, “Neighbors. Who cares?” And she was right. Measuring click rates was scammed years ago by people who know how to drive user numbers at the flick of a switch. They are a terrible measure. My final point. One of my happiest moments at Britannica was when I got to call the big boss and get him to kill a big ad from a “reader and adviser” who bought a prominent spot on the website. I’m sure that ad drew a lot of clicks from people who want predictions of the future. I can’t believe this today, but I actually had to argue that Britannica was about things that had happened, not guesses about things that might.

photo by Annie Spratt

Jim: I’m going to surprise you, Charlie, and suggest that our old Tribune acquaintance, Mr. Hunter, is raising a relevant question; it’s just not the right one to help resolve the newspaper industry’s woes. Ever since the social media giants like Google and Facebook invaded journalism, scrutinizing news preferences by measuring stories that draw the most reader clicks made marketing departments drool. You’re right. Given the nature of human curiosity, most readers will click on the “dog-floating-on-the-ice-in-Lake-Michigan” story before they open a thoughtful take on Chicago’s budget. As stupid as Mr. Hunter’s proposal may seem, the data they could gather, used properly with human oversight, could give editors valuable insights into their audiences. If abused, the exercise will simply lead to a loss of respect among readers who will think editors prioritize fluff over substance. If, as I suspect, the goal of McClatchy, now owned by a hedge fund, is to cut pay for journalists, or force them to avoid serious journalism, then Mr. Hunter will simply devalue McClatchy’s papers and fail. Most people are not stupid. Giving readers less and charging them more for papers full of fluffy clickbait is not a winning formula.

Instead of wondering where curious fingers land on an iPhone news feed, I’d like to see McClatchy wrestle with the crucial question at the core of journalism’s problems, one that publishers, editors and even journalists won’t touch. In survey after survey, citizens say journalism is crucial to a properly functioning democracy. If so, why does the public resist paying for news? I’ve done a lot of reporting on that question, ranging from my time at the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, on the faculty of the University of Michigan and on my days at the non-profit news cooperative I founded with Peter Osnos, an excellent journalist. At the Chicago News Cooperative (CNC), we asked Chicago readers to pay $2 a week, less than they typically would pay for a cup of Starbucks, for news that lived up to the rigorous editing standards of the New York Times, our partners in the project. Some readers took us up on the offer but not enough to make the CNC the self-sustaining news organization our donors wanted.

One problem was we were way ahead of our time. We started in 2009, when non-profit news organizations were considered outliers. Now, new non-profit news outfits seem to appear every day. As editor and CEO, I take full responsibility for failing to get more paid readers at the CNC. In the two-and-a-half years we operated, though, I developed lots of ideas about the public’s resistance to pay up. Answering that question is not so easy. But I did learn one thing: You don’t truly serve the best interest of readers by prioritizing clickbait over journalism that puts the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning. If a news organization embraces ideas like the one floated by Tony Hunter, it should just go ahead and close its doors. I for one will say good riddance. How about you, Charlie?

Charlie: Wait just a minute, Jim, the Chicago News Cooperative was a high-quality journalism product that had nothing but clear intent and professionalism behind it. I think the problem was born just a little earlier. I remember when newspapers started just giving their stuff away online, primarily because they thought it would lead to more page views to pitch to advertisers. But they forgot one of those basic rules of marketing and business, people are not going to pay for something they get for nothing. In that sense, I think journalism tossed itself in the campfire because some of the leaders of that era (not you) just didn’t want to recognize that a little slump in profits was no reason to abandon the model that had been around forever. And that was not based on clicks or circulation. I was called out by a marketing woman we called “The Velociraptor” because she was so determined to cram the website with useless stuff just aimed at drawing viewers. She was lecturing me in a small meeting of executives when I snapped and went into my “The public has not only a right to know, but a need to know!” that ended with a little coda about informed electorates. I became momentarily famous for this, but it didn’t last. I was out of there within the year. And happily, I might add!

Jim: The old model had its problems, too. Charlie. In effect, we gave away the paper for decades, charging 25 or 50 cents for a paper that probably cost $2 to print and distribute. We relied on advertising to make up the difference. The trouble came when advertising in newspapers went bye-bye and we didn’t know what to do. In desperation, we started giving away our content in a vain effort to get readers and keep advertisers. We had editors and executives that said the strategy wouldn’t work, including the late Charlie Brumback, a tight-fisted, bottom-line CEO at Tribune who wanted to create a print/online package for which we could charge more.

He told me in an interview for my book The Deal from Hell before he died that the circulation departments at Tribune newspapers strongly resisted his plan. Charlie’s opponents are the same people who survived the industry downturn and embraced click bait journalism. If the news industry is to survive, it will have to ditch the stale ideas of yesteryear and give readers, particularly young readers, a totally different news report that doesn’t even look like the ones we produced. I’m sorry to say I don’t see much of an appetite for that in the Tony Hunters of the world.

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.