And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [67]
The Politico’s desks sat back in a far corner of the newsroom, with a few printed vinyl banners bearing its logo hung haphazardly overhead. John Harris is in his midforties, balding, with a somewhat cherubic face and thick, blond eyebrows; the day I met him, he wore a pale-blue patterned shirt with a paisley tie in deep crimson. Jim VandeHei wore a dark brown blazer and jeans, and is younger, tall and slender, with a narrow face and short, dark boyish hair. “One of the insights Jim and I had over at the Post,” Harris told me, “was that if you look at the most e-mailed stories, it tells you whether you’re succeeding or not.” He meant succeeding not just as journalists but as provokers of conversation . “Somebody sends that story in e-mail: ‘Hey, did you read this?’ ‘Check this out.’ ‘This an interesting point.’ ‘This is bullshit.’ Somebody is engaging with that story.” And despite the web’s reputation for sensationalism, the stories on the most e-mailed list were, he added, “the ones that we were most proud of. They were the ones that were the most serious, original, enterprising.”
Harris and VandeHei began to ask themselves, Why aren’t we doing that more often? Why, in Harris’s words, “are we printing so many boring stories? Why are we doing so much obligatory duty coverage?” As an example of this latter, dutiful variety of story, VandeHei mentioned the classic pseudo-event: a presidential press conference. At major newspapers like the Post, he said, “you feel this sense of obligation to lead your newspaper the next day with a story about what Bush said at the press conference, even if he didn’t say anything that was all that revelatory, and despite the fact that it’s pretty damn stale: most news consumers have not only consumed it, they’ve digested it and moved on.”
He contrasted this with a recent Politico story that, he noted, the Post did not touch, that “ten years ago would have been confined to the inside pages of Roll Call”: the revelation that Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D., Calif.) had quit the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and alleged that its chairman, Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), had called her a “whore.” This story, VandeHei said, was “a perfect example of how media has changed. We put it upfront early on the webpage. Instantly it’s linked to by Drudge and all the other blogs; Fox News is doing a story based on it; MSNBC is doing a story based on it; and then the next day, on The Colbert Report, he does twenty minutes on ‘whore.’ So you have just, from this perch, been able to reach significantly more people than I would have reached even at the Washington Post.” The challenge for The Politico , he said, is “figuring out how to put things into that pipeline.”
I asked them about judiciousness: How did they balance the reader’s eagerness for these viral stories, on the one hand, against the potential damage, on the other hand, caused by advancing them? As examples, I named two pseudo-controversies: one about Nancy Pelosi’s jet (a pointless tempest that month, involving a request for a larger airplane for the new speaker), and also another about Barack Obama’s schooling in Indonesia (a right-wing magazine had claimed, entirely inaccurately, that Obama attended an Islamic madrassa as a child).
“We did not do anything on the Pelosi jet story,” Harris said. “Jim, why not?”
“I dunno,” VandeHei said, and mulled it over for a few moments. “If we don’t have anything new and interesting to say on it, I don’t want to say it. The Washington Times made that their story.” I thought that he and Harris had misunderstood my question, but they had not; rather, they were acting out their unconcern for its basic premise.
“What you’re describing,” Harris said, finally, “is the classic New York Times/Washington Post dilemma. They see themselves as definers of reality, papers of record. They might think that the Pelosi plane story is bullshit, or they might think the