Television Is the New Television

by Michael Wolff

  Of all the bets to make, perhaps the least safe one—and the bet underpinning digital’s hope of grabbing a meaningful piece of television’s revenues—is that people will stop watching TV, even if they stop watching the TV.

  4

  HOW NEWS CAME TO WAG THE DOG

  Most media is entertainment—narrative. Media, or its hold on us, has traditionally required beginning, middle, and end. The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, even at a pinnacle postmodernist moment of narrative rebellion, acknowledged as much, merely arguing they did not have to be in that order.

  So it’s created a basic confusion that so many media theorists and entrepreneurs frame media as, principally, or paradigmatically, news, with its weak, often necessarily fragmented, narrative structure, instead of seeing news, in business and audience terms, as a relative afterthought, and narrative—storytelling—as the main event.

  This might be because would-be serious people find beginning-middle-end stories contrived and unserious manipulations—fictions—and news to be the truer thing, in fact reality. Other than for a brief experimental moment when fiction and nonfiction seemed to intersect in the 1960s, with literary types making forays into journalism and some forms of journalism becoming literature, fiction and nonfiction have mostly remained traditional counterpoints, and separate disciplines. Storytelling was diversion and escape; news was necessary, hard truth and a public good. Even as newspeople have seemed forced to say things like “it’s all storytelling,” that seemed more like lip service to commercialism than a new view of the news craft—and, in any event, there aren’t all that many people in news or journalism, most of them literalists by temperament, who are actually good storytellers.

  Or, it might be that news is held up as a primary media form because practically minded media people understand that news, for all its narrative drawbacks, is a cheaper way into the game. Media, with its influence and attention and all its potential money, is the goal, so get into it as you can—and news seems there for the taking. What’s more, it isn’t dependent on a unique talent—or on creating fickle things like hits. CNN and Fox News Channel first bootstrapped into media success by providing lower-cost news.

  Or, it might be because at an ultimate level of media, of strategic business decisions about it, and perhaps particularly among people in the technology business—that is, people decidedly not in the media business—it is hardly understood that there is a fundamental distinction or choice, or, more important, relationship, between fiction and nonfiction, between news and narrative, between storytelling and holding the public’s attention. Who wants to bet that such a balance, such an internal sort of algorithm, has ever crossed Mark Zuckerberg’s mind?

  Digital media defaulted to the belief that information was the currency: after all, the new medium could provide information faster, cheaper, and with greater individual specificity; the functional dream from the early Web and then in essence put into mass practice by Facebook and Twitter was a newspaper just for you. As digital media was killing newspapers, it was, in its fashion, emulating them too.

  Digital media seemed especially suited to news not only because of its speed, but because of the low value of news content. After all, digital media was all betting on the revenues to come; it had no revenues when it began.

  A secret of news has always been economic triage. So much news was low cost or free filler stuff: news wires, stories rewritten from a competitor, publicity photos, hardly-rewritten-at-all press releases. Actual original content, not to mention actually good content, or crafted content, the material that readers found of sure value and exemplary technique, was largely found only up the news value chain (in rich tabloid outlets as well as highbrow places), while the mean was happily undistinguished. Hence, an early and continuing advantage for Web media entrepreneurs: news is cheap.

  Portal news outlets—Google News, Yahoo News, AOL, MSN—were all largely untended information feeds, white noise stuff, tickers. Then there was something like Gawker, which built a suite of vertical specialty sites, recycled news from other places, but added slightly more value with the briefest commentary and sense of personality.

  Mostly, digital news was a kind of information arbitrage: how cheaply can you acquire it, how many pennies more will advertisers pay for it?

  Of course, as advertisers paid less, you had to produce more of it more cheaply. In some instances, news—with an added level of investment that usually meant you’d lose money—was coupled with an added strategy to build a brand and identity that distinguished news that was otherwise undistinguished. The Huffington Post, retailing the same information as everyone else, nevertheless managed, at least to some extent, to brand its commodity (not least of all by Arianna Huffington’s own indefatigable efforts to promote the brand).

  There are many reasons that make news, and time-sensitive information, a complicated and fragile value proposition. For one thing, its value quickly degrades. The lack of value of yesterday’s news, in digital form, becomes the lack of value of news from two minutes ago (the speed of digital news undermined not only itself but traditional news as well—all news is, ever quicker, old news). For another, value depends on scarcity. If everybody knows the news, it isn’t news; if the news is available everywhere, then you hardly do a useful or valuable job by repeating it. (Here, too, ubiquity undermined digital as well as traditional news.)

  The things that might otherwise distinguish news—a long history of dependability, a unique authority, a strong personality, a level of exclusivity—were hard to establish overnight (or even in twenty years) in digital form—and even those virtues were not reliable profit drivers.

  News, other than in a time of drama and crisis, has always been a sketchy business proposition, not so much dependent on its own value, but on the circumstance that has surrounded it. The happenstance, last-man-standing nature of a newspaper in a particular community. The entertainment supplements (puzzles, games, in addition to soft-feature sections) that make up the bulk of a newspaper. The early broadcast policy considerations that created well-funded, loss-leader network news—and, for a time, there being only three networks at that. The development of unique, theatrical (attractive or repellent) personalities in cable, and before that anchormen of sonorous probity and a chatty family-style cast on morning TV. But in and of itself, news—daily, low-value information—does not have the effect on an audience that creates a particular, focused, stand-to-attention, return-here experience.

  Digital, given its reproducible, commodity-like aspects, has, to date—to say the least—largely failed to provide the circumstances that might make news, or a news product, much or more of a unique experience. Fox makes nearly $2 billion a year; CNN a bit more than a billion—both with profit margins at more than 20 percent (often much more). There are few digital news outlets that have more than $100 million in revenue, and those that do are largely traditional news organizations, like The New York Times, whose digital business has taken significantly more value from its traditional business than it has created—and few of these new outlets are profitable.

  But even that overall shrinking in business value is not the most damaging effect for digital media. Rather, the larger result is to turn the most highly valued digital media sites into something that, in the main, is rote, dull, repetitive, and of low value, a form that doesn’t warrant and cannot sustain focus, attention, identification, or what the marketing community calls engagement.

  This may simply be the nature of information—or at least of too much information. The natural impulse is to resist it, to skim over it, or to be distracted by it. This is particularly true of the category known as “general interest,” the information that’s supposed to attract a mass audience. It is the thinnest and most repetitive, and, to hold what little attention you’ve garnered from this audience, you have to continue to produce more of it, inevitably thinner and more repetitive.

  One digital media grail ha
s always been to be the processor, the sorter, the medium’s mediator, or arbiter—to be able to separate wheat from chaff. But this has effectively never happened, or no true authority has risen on a mass scale, in part because there is too much news to filter, and because the digital expectation is that anything less than at least a sense of all of it is somehow not taking advantage of the medium’s ability to deliver everything. To the extent that aggregators work, they work because the sheer amount of the aggregated information distracts you from noticing the scant value of the pieces of it.

  And yet still, this is the highest form of digital media, to use technology to accomplish some otherworldly form of what is now called, in a more or less holy fashion, curation. Pinpointing not just the information that you want, but information that is so personal and perfect for you that it is the stuff of emotional stickiness.

  It is so targeted and cosseted that it doesn’t need beginning, middle, end. Or technology supplies the work-around for beginning, middle, end.

  In this, the Facebook News Feed, with its endless experimentation (including its secret efforts to determine which psychological prompts will cause which behavioral reactions), has become the potential solution, albeit the same ultimate dream: to create that fully personalized newspaper, with you and your friends the stars of a paper, then leavened with important news and relevant information.

  This is largely the Facebook proposition—or at least the current Facebook proposition: it can qualify and reorder that custom package in such a way that it will have a heightened impact on a pool of readers suitably attractive to advertisers. That is, algorithms can create not just an orderly information world, but one so personally compelling that information becomes a highly curated, contextualized, even dramatic experience.

  And yet there seems to be the tacit understanding that information, bits and bites, however targeted, however personalized, however much a “shared” experience, is still a form that is inevitably skimmable and transient. The form itself needs upgrading.

  And what will this upgrade actually be? “Mostly video,” according to Zuckerberg, within five years.

  5

  TO BE, OR NOT TO BE, COOL

  Almost as soon as Andreessen’s Netscape turned the Web into a widely available and easy-to-manipulate visual medium after its release in 1994, the comparison with television became commonplace.

  The Web was potential mass media. But, with a little imagination, better. Actually, with infinite fractionalization it would also disrupt mass media, offering a more individualized and participatory experience than television ever could.

  In fact, the Web, and the reasons for it, were anti-television: television was the great dumbing down; the Web was potentially the great and transforming smartening up—a media renaissance.

  Given the febrile growth of the new medium and enthusiasm for it (reminiscent of nothing so much as the early days of . . . well, television), this anti-television would ultimately and surely kill the lowbrow, passive media experience.

  By the same token, the anti-television, looking forward to a deeper, more engaged attention of the American consumer, would be able to support itself by aping and inevitably stealing television’s business: advertising.

  Still, major platforms like Google and Facebook—even if taking a chunk of television’s business could vastly increase their own—certainly did not want to be thought of as television, with its significantly lower share price multiple and, culturally, its failure to adequately appreciate technology (in the parlance, its lack of innovation).

  The value of a major platform derives from the potential value of its worldwide audience of billions of people, and the ways technology might transform its users’ lives and alter their behavior—of course, taking a toll while doing so. The platforms, too, are, in this imagined future, a connective tissue, an ecosystem, a funnel (choose metaphor), through which other businesses will interact with its user base—and for those connections it, too, looks forward to taking a toll.

  But meanwhile, the here-and-now business is advertising—albeit ambivalently.

  Facebook, for instance, has an executive—an energetic woman named Carolyn Everson, based in New York, living with her family in the suburbs—who oversees advertising sales for the company. She is a media salesperson who can rather seem like a stranger in a strange land at Facebook. Her frequent presentations at sales meetings and industry events about the Facebook experience and the Facebook environment and the Facebook uniqueness, all in the kind of language that media companies use to sell and describe themselves, is peculiarly out of kilter with how Facebook itself, at its highest levels, describes itself and with what it seems to want to be.

  Mark Zuckerberg is a technology-focused multibillionaire who believes his company offers a central piece of functionality in everybody’s life. He seems at best impatient with if not contemptuous of media. From the beginning of his career and the earliest days of Facebook he has made sour pronouncements about advertising, seeing it, apparently, as a transitional revenue phase for the company. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s president, the default public presence for Zuckerberg who seemingly would rather not be publicly present, is a government and public affairs bureaucrat, more focused on Facebook’s Wall Street and political brand (and, as the author of the women’s empowerment book Lean In, her own personal brand) than on selling anything. That falls to Everson, who seems often quite caught off guard by how the company’s own view of itself contradicts the message she is trying to relate.

  Facebook, says Zuckerberg, with some impatience, is not “cool”—with cool having an apparent meaning involving pandering, or showing off, of having to chase fads, or of having to indulge the whims of customers (that is, media attributes), quite apart from the company’s real nature as a vast inescapable parallel human system. To Zuckerberg, Facebook ought to be, and to him, apparently is, a “utility.”

  That is a strange designation in many respects, not least of all because there is always a much greater rationale for regulating utilities as necessary, and most often monopolistic, organizational structures of modern life. Governments have a clear interest in utilities, because they are a shared resource. In many parts of the world, utilities are not just regulated by governments, they are owned by them.

  Utilities are in some sense the very opposite of media, the former necessary, the latter fanciful, transient, ephemeral—and that, no doubt, is Zuckerberg’s point. It likely plays to the all-important engineer constituency at Facebook, that sense of building a permanent infrastructure, and, other than the word itself (with its regulatory and commodity connotations), perhaps to the investment community suggesting some ultimate, worldwide system of human dependence and efficiency (the growth stock version of Ma Bell).

  But what of the people who are now paying the bills—the advertisers?

  A utility is not only the opposite of media, but its negation.

  Media demands an experience, a utility is a nonexperience; the less you are aware of it, the more successful it is.

  Media is an environment, a utility is a conduit.

  Media is a show, a utility is the back end.

  And yet Facebook, and this is true as well at Google, and to an extent at Amazon, is filled with people whose very purpose is to extol the experience, the environment, and the show. It makes for a schizoid job, and a deeply divided sense of business self, making your money from a business you did not necessarily intend to be in, and which you hope to transcend.

  But transcendence requires a fairly sophisticated and elaborate rationale, which seems to come down to, “We are not in the media business, we are in the improvement of, or the reinvention of the media business.”

  And that has turned out to be a cogent argument. Even if the media business, especially television, might be a good business, it is an unmistakably better position if you can convince people that you are creating a better business tha
n the already good business.

  That better business is going to be created of course through technology—through, theoretically, the extraordinary intelligence that the system can supply about the known desires and the predictable behaviors of the people using the system, which will enable a more efficient marketing relationship and, in short order, transaction.

  Having done this, it might not just be advertiser fees that will be collected, but fees born of the leverage of causing the transaction, of collecting the money for the transaction, and of introducing other players into the funnel of such a transaction, enabling these third parties to collect fees upon which you, too, of course will take a further taste.

  This ambition, however great, can seem to ignore, or obscure, or obviate the need to actually make media—that is, to put on a show. Both Facebook and Google have been quite militant about not being content creators, about not going down that slippery slope, and turning up their nose at what they suggest is a lower and more primitive order of economic activity.

  When Yuri Milner, the Russian investor who would become the largest outside holder of Facebook stock, first looked at the company, it was this aspect that he found most compelling: Facebook, in an ultimate example of participatory media, had harnessed its users’ enthusiasm so that they would put on the show, endlessly entertaining one another, costing Facebook nothing. For Milner this was a revolution in media—media without, well, media. No-cost media.

  There is something of the reformers’ zeal here. There is almost a puritanical streak about not spending the kind of money that content demands, and engaging in the wastefulness that content seems to require (many efforts to produce one hit), and as well a disdain or revulsion for the ego involved, and the resources that egomaniacs consume, and the ultimate hollowness and unattainability of the pursuit of cool.