As a self-taught sort-of-expert on mass media (through 15 years of experience in dealing with them and through reading a lot of books and articles about how mass media, especially online media, works), I’d like to talk about why certain types of articles get published and especially why second and third articles get written about the same story.

Newspapers (whether online or printed) are not in the business of providing news, entertainment, sports, or editorial insight. That may be their product to you, but you are not their customer!

Newspapers are in the business of selling advertising space. Period.

That is how they get paid. That is how they make money. Period.

So how do they sell advertising space and, even more importantly, how do they charge as much as possible for it?

In the print world, it’s based on circulation (how many papers are printed in a day or a week or a month). The advertisers pay based on approximately how many people are likely to see their ads. The more people, the more they pay.

On television, advertisers pay many more times the amount of money for a Superbowl ad than for an ad during American Idol because many more times the number of people watch the Superbowl.

It’s similar in the online world, but it’s based on page views (or “clicks”). The more people who view the pages of an online newspaper, the more they can charge their advertisers. They literally count the clicks on all of their pages, average it out, and that goes into a calculator that helps them determine what they can charge advertisers to put an ad on one of their pages.

So what does that mean to us?

If a news organization can find a titillating, horrifying, attention-grabbing story to run with and if they can create multiple articles from the one story, they know that they’re going to get massive amounts of page views, much more than almost any other story they could run (other than perhaps a huge disaster involving multiple deaths). In the world I was in, it was “pit bulls”, but it could be any number of other things.

The story does not have to be factual or researched properly. The writer may actually believe what he’s written but do you think the newspaper cares at all about the content of his article? Of course not! They’re just looking for “clicks”.

As long as the subject is controversial enough to generate tons of page views and reams of comments, they’re getting their clicks, they’re increasing their average page views and, ultimately, they’re able to charge more for their advertising space.

So who wins in this scenario?

Not the commenters (whether for or against the article). The only people who ever comment on news articles and, believe me, the only people who ever read those comments are the people who’ve already made up their minds and who are already active in either the pro- or anti- camps. Nobody in the general public reads these comments.

How about the public? Are they benefiting from this article? Of course not, because they’re not getting true information.

So who benefits?

The newspaper!! That’s who. They and the “journalist” who works for them are the only ones benefiting from this article.

Every time someone shares an article like this, every time someone clicks on it, one thing and one thing only is accomplished. The newspaper makes more money.

That’s it. That’s all. It’s that simple.

And, therefore, indirectly, the “journalist” benefits because he works for the newspaper. If he’s a freelancer, he’ll get more work because he produces huge page views. If he’s an employee, he might get a raise or he might just get handed more of these types of assignments, but at least his employer benefits and he gets to keep his job.

This is just like positive reinforcement dog training. They run a biased, controversial, anger-generating story. They get massive numbers of clicks. They make more money.

What do you think their next step is going to be?

You got it. Run another article that does the same thing. If they can come at exactly the same subject from a slightly different angle or if they can provide an “update” to the original story, so much the better. Then they don’t have to put much work into something that’s already been proven to get the views.

So, if we are on one side of an issue and the news organization publishes an article promoting the opposite point of view, we are accomplishing three things by clicking and sharing these articles en masse.

1. We’re putting money into the bank account of the very newspaper that’s printing the thing we disagree with.

2. We’re helping to secure that journalist’s job and perhaps also put money in his pocket.

3. We’re guaranteeing that another negative article will get written for that newspaper, probably by the same journalist.

If that’s what you want, then go ahead. Click and Share.

Me? I won’t be doing that.