by Ryan Holiday
“It felt sort of like blackmail,” said Renato Fischer, the Danone representative who fielded the inquiry, to MIT’s Technology Review.1 Well, that’s because it was blackmail. It was extortion via viral video.
THE IMPLICIT SHAKEDOWN
Molotese’s hustle is one of many styles of a shakedown that happen across the web countless times a day. Its only distinguishing feature was its brazenness. It’s usually couched in slightly more opaque terms.
Take Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post entitled “Why We Often Blindside Companies.” What begins as an apparent discussion of the site’s news policy I see as a veiled threat to the Silicon Valley tech scene. After a start-up founder had, for the “second time,” publicly announced news about her own life before Arrington’s site had a chance to write about it (TechCrunch told her they were writing a story about her, so she broke the news herself), Arrington decided to make an example out of her. First he told his readers that he had nasty personal information on the founder that he had been reluctant to publish. This was a not so subtle reminder that he had dirt on everyone and that his personal whim decided whether it got out or not. Then Arrington took his stand, saying the founder would no longer be “getting any calls from [him] in the future to give her a heads up that [TechCrunch is] breaking news about her start up.” As though the journalist’s job to speak to sources they are writing about was a courtesy. He concluded on a friendlier note: “Treat us with respect and you’ll get it back. That’s all we ask.”* He may have ended his post nicely, but his message sounds no less extortionary to me than Molotese’s.2
Many other blogs do the same thing through a combination of a sense of entitlement and laziness. A group of hotel chains is currently litigating a lawsuit against TripAdvisor and other travel sites over defamatory reviews that the sites won’t remove. A mostly positive 2010 Financial Times article about the rising influence of blogs covering the luxury watch market featured a small complaint from a watch manufacturer about a blogger who often got important details and product specifications wrong, in addition to having typos and bad grammar. In response, the editor of another watch-industry blog, TheWatchLounge, leaped to the site’s defense: “What is the luxury watch industry doing to help him become a better writer?” he demanded to know. “And for that matter what is the industry doing to help any of these bloggers become better writers?”3
I would ask the same question of him that I once posed to a blogger who kept getting a story about American Apparel wrong. “When you find a mistake,” he’d said, “e-mail me and point it out.” I had to ask: Hey man, why is my job to do your job?
A while back, a plane of a major airline experienced potentially catastrophic trouble in the air. Despite a flaming engine and poor odds, the pilot managed to land it safely, saving the lives of four-hundred-plus passengers. Yet, as events transpired, Twitter users went berserk and reported that the plane had tragically crashed. In reality, the plane had not only landed safely, but the pilot acted like a gentleman from another generation, offering the passengers his personal telephone number if they had more questions or wanted someone to talk to. He exuded humble and quiet heroism that should have been recognized.
Only nobody knew about it, because the story online was so different. The Harvard Business Review criticized the airline for not responding quickly enough with marketing spin and for not magically stopping the rampant online speculation. They wrote: “What a pity that social media users, in their well-known enthusiasm for being first to share breaking news to their followers, would unwittingly conspire to obscure the big story of a pilot’s life-saving landing” [emphasis mine].
Yes, a pity. A word a neighborhood thug might use in the hypothetical, “It’d be a pity if something ever happened to this nice little shop of yours,” and then try to collect monthly protection. These are the economics of extortion. The threat is less overt than “pay us or else,” but it’s a demand nonetheless. You must provide more fuel to the story and get out in front of it (even when there are more important things going on, like, you know, not letting the jet crash), or your reputation will be ruined. To not do this is to risk a vivid misperception that is impossible to correct with the truth, or anything else.
A CULTURE OF FEAR
Most social media experts have accepted this paradigm and teach it to their clients without questioning it: Give blogs special treatment or they’ll attack you. At any time, a hole could be dug by blogs, Twitter, or YouTube that the company must pay to fill in. And depending on the intentions of the person who dug it, they may also ask to be paid to not dig them anymore.
Being right is more important to the person being written about than the person writing. So who do you think blinks first? Who has to spend thousands of dollars advertising online to counteract undeserved bad press? Who ultimately hires a spinmaster like me to start filling the discussions with good things just to drown out the bullshit?
Today there are dozens of firms that offer reputation-management services to companies and individuals. Though they dress up their offerings with jargon about performance metrics and customer feedback, their real service is to handle the disturbing, nasty, and corrupt dealings I’ve talked about in this book, so you don’t have to. In a way, that’s what I do too. I figure out how to stretch Arrington’s definition of what the rules are as much as possible.
Navigating this terrain has become a critical part of brand management. The constant threat of being blindsided by a false controversy, or crucified unfairly for some misconstrued remark, hovers over everyone in the public sphere. Employees, good, bad, or disgruntled and desperate for money, know that they have the means to massively embarrass their employers with well-placed accusations of mistreatment or harassment. People know that going to a blog like Consumerist is the fastest way to get revenge for any perceived customer-service slight.
That there are a million eyes watching, each incentivized to demagogue their way to a traffic payday, dominates discussions in corporate boardrooms, design departments, and political strategy sessions. What effect does it have? Aside from making them rightly cynical, it forces them to act in two ways—deliberately provocative or conservatively fake. In a word: unreal.
Blogs criticize companies, politicians, and personalities for being artificial but mock them ruthlessly for engaging in media stunts, and blame them for even the slightest mistake. Nuance is a weakness. As a result, politicians must stick even more closely to their prepared remarks. Companies bury their essence in even more convoluted marketing-speak. Public figures cannot answer a question with anything but: “No comment.” Everyone limits their exposure to risk by being fake.
It’s now common for indie bands to avoid or turn down as much online press as possible, with some even going as far as obscuring their likenesses or withholding their names. Why? They are petrified of the backlash that has sunk so many promising “blog-buzz” bands that came before them. With the hype comes the threat of hate, and I don’t think this is limited to music blogs.
Overstock.com was compelled to address this unpredictable and aggressive web culture in a recent 10-K filing with the SEC. It is a precautionary measure many companies will have to take in the future—to let investors know how blogs could impact their financials with little warning and little recourse. Designating it as one of three major risk factors to the company, Overstock.com wrote, “Use of social media may adversely impact our reputation.”
There has been a marked increase in use of social media platforms and similar devices, including weblogs (blogs), social media websites, and other forms of Internet-based communications which allow individuals access to a broad audience of consumers and other interested persons. Consumers value readily available information concerning retailers, manufacturers, and their goods and services and often act on such information without further investigation, authentication and without regard to its accuracy. The availability of information on social media platforms and devices is virtually immediate as is its impact.
Social media platforms and devices immediately publish the content their subscribers and participants post, often without filters or checks on accuracy of the content posted. The opportunity for [the] dissemination of information, including inaccurate information, is seemingly limitless and readily available. Information concerning the Company may be posted on such platforms and devices at any time. Information posted may be adverse to our interests, it may be inaccurate, and may harm our performance, prospects or business. The harm may be immediate, without affording us an opportunity for redress or correction. Such platforms also could be used for dissemination of trade secret information, compromise of valuable company assets all of which could harm our business, prospects, financial condition and [the] results of operations.
Alarmist? Maybe. But I have seen hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap evaporate on the news of some bogus blog post. When the blog Engadget posted a fake e-mail announcing a supposed delay in the release of a new iPhone and Apple operating system, it knocked more than $4 billion off Apple’s stock price. The 2008 election was nearly derailed when the same “citizen reporter,” on separate occasions, tricked both Obama and a campaigning Bill Clinton into saying something vulnerable and honest by misrepresenting herself. The sixty-one-year-old woman later admitted that the two figures had “had no idea [she] was a journalist,” nor that she was recording them with a hidden device. Then, angered by the lack of compensation from the Huffington Post for her “scoops,” she resigned by publishing private e-mails between herself and Arianna Huffington—just to get one last blast of attention at someone else’s expense.
I’ve even done this myself, by advising a friend who needed to strike back at a very famous talent agent (with a legendary bad temper and a reputation for screwing people over) how to have a lawyer draft a letter announcing his intention to file an embarrassing lawsuit, which he could then leak to gossip blogs. Not a real lawsuit, mind you, but the illusion of one through an intention letter. The threat made it on TMZ, ESPN, and a host of other blogs.
I ran into the friend recently and learned the outcome of the tactic: They paid him five hundred thousand dollars to go away. I think about this often. They may have stolen from my friend, but I still shook someone down. What strikes me is not that it was some elaborate, orchestrated con—I don’t feel like I discovered some criminal instinct inside myself either—it’s that the tools were so accessible and easy to use, it was almost difficult not to do so. In fact, it came so effortlessly that I didn’t even remember doing it until he reminded me.
The way someone can be exploited through both the legal system (anyone can be sued for anything) and the media, when they cover it (libel of public figures generally requires malicious intent or reckless disregard of the truth), reminds me of the gruesome accident in Meet Joe Black in which Brad Pitt’s character is hit by a car, tossed up in the air, and hit by another car going in the other direction.
To not be petrified of a shakedown, a malicious lie, or an unscrupulous rival planting stories is to be unimportant. You only have nothing to fear if you’re a nobody. And even then, well, who knows?
* I heard an even more anguished version of this cry from the family of a celebrity who contacted me after their son’s death. They wanted help with Wikipedia users who were inserting speculative and untrue information about his tragic accident.
XVIII
THE ITERATIVE HUSTLE
ONLINE JOURNALISM’S BOGUS PHILOSOPHY
IN THIS BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT THE ECOnomics of blogs. I’ve done my best to point my finger at the forces behind the medium rather than at bloggers themselves. It’s how I have always tried to look at this problem, even while I was besieged by unfair controversies or stabbed in the back in public. But that attitude breaks down and becomes impossible when it comes to a certain style of blogging: Iterative Journalism.
Not satisfied merely to have their naked greed accepted as a motivation, publishers and media gurus had to invent a pseudo-philosophy. And after hearing them blather on about it long enough, I have to expose it for the scam that it is.
Iterative journalism, process journalism, beta journalism—whatever name you use, it’s stupid and dangerous. It calls for bloggers to publish first and then verify what they wrote after they’ve posted it. Publishers actually believe that their writers need to do every part of the newsmaking process, from discovery to fact-checking to writing and editing in real time. It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds why that is a bad thing—but they buy the lie that iterative journalism improves the news.
Having observed this process in action many times, I know that this isn’t true. It’s the reason I now spend my time playing defense instead of offense. I end up stuck putting out fires that never needed to start in the first place. It’s why I get e-mails at 6:00 A.M. from writers like Irin Carmon asking for a comment on a story of the most dubious origins that they already had decided to “break.”
Why would bloggers do anything else? Erik Wemple, a blogger for the Washington Post, writes: “The imperative is to pounce on news when it happens and, in this case, before it happens. To wait for another source is to set the table for someone who’s going to steal your search traffic.” So by the time I’ve woken up in the morning too much misinformation has been spread around the web to possibly be cleaned up. The “incentives are lined up this way,” Tommy Craggs of Deadspin tells us, so we better get used to it.1
WHAT IS ITERATIVE JOURNALISM?
First, let’s start with what iterative journalism is not. It is not saying, “This is what we don’t know or need to know for this story to be important.” It is not saying: “Everybody stop! I am going to get to the bottom of this for you.” Instead, iterative journalists throw up their hands, claim to be knowledge-less, and report whatever they’ve heard as the news.
Seeking Alpha practiced it perfectly on one recent story: “If the newspaper is correct, and I have no way of verifying it, then this stock is in big trouble.” Really? No way at all? At its best, iterative journalism is what TechCrunch does: rile up the crowd by repeating sensational allegations and then pretend that they are waiting for the facts to come in. They see no contradiction between publishing a post with the headline “Paypal Shreds Ostensibly Rare Violin Because It Cares” and then writing, “Now a lot of this story isn’t out yet and I have a line in to Paypal about this, so before we get out the pitchforks lets discuss what happened.”2
Iterative journalists follow blindly wherever the wisps of the speculation may take them, do the absolute minimum amount of research or corroboration, and then post this suspect information immediately, as it is known, in a continuous stream. As Jeff Jarvis put it: “Online, we often publish first and edit later. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning.”
This “learning process” is not some epistemological quest. Dropping the ruse, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch put it more bluntly: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.” And by extension, since it doesn’t cost him anything to be wrong, he presumably doesn’t bother trying to avoid it. It’s not just less costly; it makes more money, because every time a blog has to correct itself, it gets another post out of it—more pageviews.*
The iterative approach sells itself as flexible and informative, but much more realistically, it manifests in the forms of rumors, half-truths, shoddy reporting, overwhelming amounts of needless information, and endless predictions and projections. Instead of using slow-to-respond official sources or documents, it leans on rumors, buzz, and questions. Events are “liveblogged” instead of filtered. Bloggers post constantly, depending on others to point out errors or send in updates, or for sources to contact them.
Iterative journalism is defined by its jumpiness. It is as jumpy as reporters can get without outright making things up. Only the slightest twitch is needed for a journalist to get a story live. As a result, stories c
laiming massive implications, like takeover talks, lawsuits, potential legislation, pending announcements, and criminal allegations, are often posted despite having minuscule origins. A tweet, a comment on a blog, or an e-mail tip might be enough to do the trick. Bloggers don’t fabricate news, but they do suspend their disbelief, common sense, and responsibility in order to get to big stories first. The pressure to “get something up” is inherently at odds with the desire to “get things right.”
A blog practicing iterative journalism would report they are hearing that Google is planning to buy Twitter or Yelp, or break the news of reports that the president has been assassinated (all falsely reported online many times now). The blog would publish the story as it investigates these facts—that is, publish the rumor first while they see if there is anything more to the story. Hypothetically, a media manipulator for Yelp would be behind the leak, knowing that getting the rumors of the acquisition out there could help them jack up the price in negotiations. I personally wouldn’t kick off reports about the president’s death, because I wouldn’t get anything from it, but plenty of pranksters would.
If a blog is lucky, the gamble it took on a sketchy iterative tip will be confirmed later by events. If they are unlucky, and this is the real insidious part of it, the site simply continues to report on the reaction to the news, as though they had nothing to do with creating it. This is what happened to Business Insider when they wrongly made the shocking claim that New York governor David Paterson would resign. The end of the headline was simply updated from “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Resignation To Follow” to “NYT’s Big David Paterson Bombshell Will Break Monday, Governor’s Office Denies Resignation In Works”3 [emphasis mine].
