Trust Me I'm Lying (5th Anniversary Edition)

by Ryan Holiday

  In a subscription model the headline of any one article competes only with the other articles included in the publication. The articles on the front page compete with those on the inside pages, and perhaps with the notion of putting down the paper entirely, but they do not, for the most part, compete head to head with the front pages of other newspapers. The subscription takes care of that—you already made your choice. As a result, the job of the headline writer for media consumed by subscription is relatively easy. The reader has already paid for the publication, so they’ll probably read the content in front of them.

  The predicament of an online publisher today is that it has no such buffer. Its creative solution, as it was one hundred years ago, is exaggeration and lies and bogus tags like exclusive, extra, unprecedented,* and photos in the requisite capital letters. They overstate their stories, latching on to the most compelling angles and parading themselves in front of the public like a prostitute. They are more than willing for PR people and marketers to be their partners in crime.

  PICK ME, PICK ME !

  In 1971, the New York Times, a subscription paper, had a big story on their hands. A disillusioned government analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of documents, now known as the Pentagon Papers, proving that the United States had systematically deceived the public and the world to go to war with Vietnam.

  Could a one-off paper have gotten away with this headline?: vietnam archive: a consensus to bomb developed before ’64 election, study says.

  Because that’s what the New York Times ran, still successfully reaching everyone in the country with the big news. They could afford to be reasoned, calm, and circumspect while still aggressively pursuing the story, despite the shameful efforts of the U.S. government to block its publication. The truth and significance of the Pentagon Papers were enough.

  Compare this to a headline I conned Jezebel into writing for a nonevent: exclusive: american apparel’s rejected halloween costume ideas (american appalling).3 It did nearly 100,000 pageviews. Not only was the headline overstated, but as I said before, the leak was fake. I just had one of my employees send over some extra photos that couldn’t be used for legal reasons.

  Again, as a writer who sees my own articles dressed up with fancy headlines online, I’m often amused by the absurdity. Take a piece with exclusive interview as the tag. Does that mean that I am the only person to ever interview that person, or that this site is the only place that has my interview with that person? There’s really no way to know . . . unless you click.

  Outside of the subscription model, headlines are intended not to represent the contents of articles but to sell them—to win the fight for attention against an infinite number of other blogs or papers. They must so captivate the customer that they click or plunk down the money to buy them. Each headline competes with every other headline. On a blog, every page is the front page. It’s no wonder that the headlines of the yellow press and the headlines of blogs run to such extremes. It is a desperate fight. Life or death.

  And what are the consequences? You’re not a subscriber. You can’t take your click back. They’ve already sold it on a real-time advertising exchange. They’ve already been paid for it. (And remember, if you share the article in exasperation or even sheer disgust to a friend to show them how bad it is, you’re actually helping the outlet!)

  The columnist and media critic Walter Lippmann once observed, “The reader expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk or cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him.” And he said that when a lot more people still did pay for newspapers (and they cost literally three cents). He concluded by saying that the “newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.” That’s a lot of pressure on the shoulders of an editor or writer, but imagine the pressure today, when every single article published—hundreds of them a day across a single publication—is fighting for reelection. It’s going to get very noisy and there’s going to be a lot of mudslinging and lying. It’s the dirtiest politics there is.

  For the most part, newspapers from the stable period not only had plainly stated headlines, but also had a tradition of witty headlines. Readers had time to get subtle jokes. There could be puns and allusions. There could be intelligent references. They could be understated. Things are a little different now. As they say, Google doesn’t laugh (or think). Google sends literally billions of clicks a month to publishers through Google News and another three billion clicks through its search and other services.4

  Follow a story through Google News and you’ll see. The service begins by displaying twenty or so main news stories from which a reader may choose. I may read one article, or I may read five, but I likely will not read all, so each one vies for my attention—screaming, in not so many words, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” Google News displays the story from a handful of outlets under each of those bold headlines. If the main headline is from CNN, the smaller headlines underneath may be from Fox News or the Washington Post or Wikipedia or TalkingPointsMemo. Each outlet’s headline screams, “Pick me! Pick me!” and Google alludes to the rest of the iceberg lurking beneath under these chosen few: “All 522 news articles.” How does one stand out against five hundred other articles? Its scream of “No, pick me! Pick me!” must be the loudest and most extreme.

  For millennials, Facebook is the single biggest news source—they’re not going to CNN.com or turning on the evening news to be informed; they are using Facebook as a filter, as a discovery tool for that news. A 2016 Pew Report found that 62 percent of adults get some of their news from Facebook and 18 percent get it regularly from Facebook. As with Google News, it’s Facebook’s algorithm that creates the competition between headlines, but in this case news is trying to be heard not just over other news but also over memes, family photos, and personal news. So it’s “PICK ME! PICK ME! IGNORE YOUR SISTER’S NEW BABY! PICK ME!”

  Andrew Malcolm, creator of the Los Angeles Times’s massive Top of the Ticket political blog (which did 33 million readers in two years), specifically asks himself before writing a headline, “How can we make our item stick out from all the other ones?” And from this bold approach to editorial ethics comes proud election-cycle headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Shot a Duck Once” and “McCain Comes Out Against Deadly Nuclear Weapons, Obama Does Too.” I’m not cherry-picking: That’s what he chose to brag about in a book of advice to aspiring bloggers.

  “We do ironic headlines, smart headlines, and work hard to make very serious stories as interesting as we can,” Arianna Huffington told the New York Times.5 “We pride ourselves on bringing in our community on which headlines work best.”

  They also do their headlines in a massive thirty-two-point font. By “best” Huffington does not mean the one that represents the story better. The question is not “Was this headline accurate?” but “Was it clicked more than the others?” The headlines must work for the publisher, not the reader. Yahoo!’s homepage, for example, tests more than 45,000 unique combinations of story headlines and photos every five minutes.6 They too pride themselves on how they display the best four main stories they can, but I don’t think their complicated, four-years-in-the-making algorithm shares any human’s definition of that word.

  SPELLING IT OUT FOR THEM

  It should be clear what types of headlines blogs are interested in. It’s not pretty, but if that’s what they want, give it to them. You don’t really have a choice. They aren’t going to write about you, your clients, or your story unless it can be turned into a headline that will drive traffic.

  You figured out the best way to do this when you were twelve years old and wanted something from your parents: Come up with the idea and let them think they were the ones who came up with it. Basically, write the headline—or hint at the options—in your e-mail or press release or whatever you give to the blogger and let them s
teal it. That’s what publicists are thinking when they pitch: Is there a great headline here? Because if the story is “Person You’ve Never Heard Of Does Something Not That Interesting,” no site is going to bite. Instead, the click-friendly, share-provoking headline has to be so obvious and enticing that there is no way they can pass it up. Hell, make them tone it down. They’ll be so happy to have the headline that they won’t bother to check whether it’s true or not.

  Their job is to think about the headline above all else. The medium and their bosses force them to. So that’s where you make the sale. Only the reader gets stuck with the buyer’s remorse.

  *My favorite: The Washington Post accidentally published this headline to an article about weather preparedness: “SEO Headline Here” (“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”).

  *For some more fun headlines, the walls of Keens Steakhouse in New York City are covered with amazing front-page headlines from its glory days in the late nineteenth century.

  *This one is my favorite, because the thing always happens to be not only not unprecedented but hilariously pedestrian.

  X

  TACTIC #7

  KILL ’EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS

  A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

  —NEIL STRAUSS, WALL STREET JOURNAL

  THE BREAKTHROUGH FOR BLOGGING AS A BUSINESS was the ability to track what gets read and what doesn’t. From Gizmodo to the Guardian, sites of all sizes are open about their dependence on pageview statistics for editorial decisions.

  Editors and analysts know what spreads, what draws traffic, and what doesn’t, and they direct their employees accordingly. The Wall Street Journal uses traffic data to decide which articles will be displayed on its homepage and for how long. Low-tracking articles are removed; heat-seeking articles get moved up. A self-proclaimed web-first paper like the Christian Science Monitor scours Google Trends for story ideas that help the paper “ride the Google wave.” Places like Yahoo! and Demand Media (now Leaf Group) commission their stories in real time based on search data. Other sites take topics trending on Twitter, Techmeme, and News whip.com and scurry to get a post up in order to be included in the list of articles for a particular event. Even tiny one-person blogs eagerly check their stat counters for the first sign of a spike.

  Bloggers publish constantly in order to hit their pageview goals or quotas, so when you can give them something that gets them even one view closer to that goal, you’re serving their interests while serving yours. To ignore these numbers in an era of pageview journalism is business suicide for bloggers and media manipulators. And anything that pervasive pre sents opportunities for abuse.

  I see it like this: The “Top 10 Most Read” or “Top 10 Most Popular” section that now exists on most large websites is a compass for the editors and publishers. But it’s hardly some foolproof, reliable indicator of what’s working and what’s not working. Marketers know it’s not only possible but easy to mess with the magnet inside the compass and watch as its owner goes wildly off track.

  A friend of mine at a big marketing agency would often run what he called the “leaderboard strategy.” If someone wrote about one of his clients, the agency would direct lots of traffic to that article until it was the most-read piece of the day on the site and featured on the leaderboard (and once there, would get additional organic traffic). This almost always generated more coverage on that site and on other sites. Bloggers had proof that writing about his client generated traffic, and the client wrote it off as a big victory for their ego and for their business—no one ever thought to check the source of it all.

  It hit me just how badly publishers were willing to grovel for a pageview handout when I placed an excerpt of a client’s book on a well-known website. The day it ran, the site’s editor sent me an e-mail: “Hey, we hate to ask but could you guys be sure to tweet and share the article for us?”

  Dear God, I realized, my client has more readers than they do. The website needed us to attract an audience for them. They wanted the subject of the piece to send his readers over to them rather than the other way around.

  As economists love to say, incentives matter. What makes the Most Popular or Most E-mailed leaderboard on Salon.com or the New York Times is a clear directive that tells writers what kinds of stories to head toward. If you have a large and loyal following, that’s a really attractive outlet to a potential reporter—and it can be dangled accordingly: Write something I like and I’ll share it with my audience.

  THE DISTURBING SCIENCE

  Yellow papers had their own circulation dragons; instead of celebrity slideshows, these papers had staples like hating black people, preposterous Wall Street conspiracies, and gruesome rape and murder stories. But while in the past decisions were guided by an editor’s intuitive sense of what would pander to their audience, today it is a science.

  Sites employ full-time data analysts to ensure that the absolute worst is brought out in the audience. Gawker Media was one of the first publishers to display its stats on a big screen in the middle of its newsroom. The public even used to be able to look at a version of it at Gawker.com/stats. Millions of visitors and millions of dollars are to be had from content and traffic analysis. It just happens that these statistics become the handles by which manipulators can pick up and hijack the news.

  It’s too transparent and simple for that not to be the case. For some blog empires, the content-creation process is now a pageview-centric checklist that asks writers to think of everything except “Is what I am making any good?” AOL is one of these organizations, as it emphatically (and embarrassingly) outlined in a memo titled “The AOL Way.” If writers and editors want to post something on the AOL platform, they must ask themselves:

  How many pageviews will this content generate? Is this story SEO-winning for in-demand terms? How can we modify it to include more terms? Can we bring in contributors with their own followers? What CPM will this content earn? How much will this content cost to produce? How long will it take to produce?1

  And other such stupid questions.

  Even the famed New Yorker writer Susan Orlean has admitted her gravitational pull toward the stories on the Most Popular lists, as a reader and as a writer. “Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me?” she writes.

  Does it mean it’s a good story or just a seductive one? Isn’t my purpose on this earth, at least professionally, precisely to read the most unpopular stories? Shouldn’t I ignore this list? Shouldn’t I roam through the news unconcerned and maybe even unin-formed of how many other people read this same news and “voted” for it?2

  But in the end these guilty pangs cannot win out. Amid the clutter and chaos of a busy site, the lists pop. The headlines scream out to be clicked. Those articles seem more interesting than everything else. Plus, hey, they appear to be vetted by the rest of the world. That can occasionally be a good thing, as Orlean points out, but is it worth it?

  Sometimes they contain a nice surprise, a story I might not have noticed otherwise. Sometimes they simply confirm the obvious, the story you know is in the air and on everybody’s mind. Never do they include a story that is quiet and ordinary but wonderful to read. [emphasis mine]

  That great insight is often buried in material that seems quiet, and ordinary does not matter to blogging. That wouldn’t get clicks.

  I’m fond of a line by Nicolas Chamfort, a French writer, who believed that popular public opinion was the absolute worst kind of opinion. “One can be certain,” he said, “that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority.” To a marketer, it’s just as well, because idiocy is easier to create than anything else.

  THEIR METRICS, YOUR ADVANTAGE

 
; What gets measured gets managed, or so the saying goes. So what do publishers measure? Out of everything that can possibly be measured, blogs have picked a handful of the most straightforward and cost-effective metrics to rely on (wonderfulness is not one of them). They choose to measure only what can be clearly communicated to their writers as goals. Like officers in Vietnam ordered to report body counts back to Washington as indicators of success or failure, these ill-conceived metrics—based on simplicity more than anything else—make bloggers do awful things.

  To understand bloggers, rephrase the saying as “Simplistic measurements matter.” Like, did a shitload of people see it? Must be good. Was there a raging comments section going? Awesome! Did the story get picked up on Media Redefined? It made the Drudge Report? Yes! In practice, this is all blogs really have time to look for, and it’s easy to give it to them.

  I exploit these pseudo-metrics all the time. If other blogs have covered something, competitors rush to copy them, because they assume there is traffic in it. As a result, getting coverage on one site can simply be a matter of sending those links to an unoriginal blogger. That those links were scored under false pretenses hardly matters. How could anyone tell? Showing that a story you want written is connected to a popular or search engine–friendly topic (preferably one the site already has posts about) does the same thing. However tenuous the connection, it satisfies the page view impulse and gives the blogger an excuse to send readers to their stories. You’ve done something that gets them paid.