Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday Page B
Authors: Ryan Holiday
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from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.
* Day invented the Help Wanted and Classifieds sections around this time. It was a highly effective way to drive daily sales.
* In other words, we’ve been tearing down public figures on bogus charges for more than a century. Do yourself a favor and look up the Fatty Arbuckle scandal for a sobering look at One-Off consequences.
* RSS readers Bloglines and NewsGator are in the deadpool. Apple’s Mountain Lion OS X doesn’t include RSS, and Google no longer features Reader in its top-level navigation. The latest versions of the Firefox browser don’t even have RSS buttons. Twitter and Facebook both stopped supporting direct RSS feeds. And the death of RSS has been heralded in a million headlines.
IX
TACTIC #6
MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE
FOR MEDIA THAT LIVES AND DIES BY CLICKS (THE ONE-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It’s what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine. In a one-off world there is nothing more important than the pitch to prospective buyers. And they need many exciting new pitches every day, each louder and more compelling than the last. Even if reality is not so interesting.
That’s where I come in. I make up the news; blogs make up the headline.
Although it seems easy, headline writing is an incredibly difficult task. The editor has to reduce an entire story down to just a few units of text—turning a few hundred- or thousand-word piece into just a few words, period. In the process it must express the article’s central ideas in an exciting way.
According to Gabriel Snyder, the former managing editor of Gawker Media and now an editor at the traffic powerhouse TheAtlantic.com , blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.” Readers and revenue depend on the headline’s ability to win this fight.
In the days of the yellow press the front pages of the World and the Journal went head to head every day, driving each other to greater and greater extremes. As a publisher, William Randolph Hearst obsessed over his headlines, tweaking their wording, writing and rewriting them, riding his editors until they were perfect. Each one, he thought, could steal another one hundred readers away from another paper. 1
It worked. As a young man Upton Sinclair remembered hearing the newsboys shouting “Extra!” and saw the headline “War Declared!” splashed across the front page of Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. He parted with his hard-earned pennies and read eagerly, only to find something rather different between what he’d thought and what he’d bought. It was actually: “War (may be) Declared (soon).” 2
They won, he lost. That same hustle happens online every day. Each blog is competing not just to be the leader on a particular story but against all the other topics a reader could potentially commit to reading about (and also against checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and watching videos, or even pornography). So here we are in 2012, on our fancy MacBooks and wireless Internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.
From today: *
Naked Lady Gaga Talks Drugs and Celibacy
Hugh Hefner: I Am Not a Sex Slave Rapist in a Palace of Poop
The Top Nine Videos of Babies Farting and/or Laughing with Kittens
How Justin Bieber Caught a Contagious Syphilis Rumor
WATCH: Heartbroken Diddy Offers to Expose Himself to Chelsea Handler
Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life
Penguin Shits on Senate Floor
Now compare those to some of these classic headlines from 1898 to 1903:
WAR WILL BE DECLARED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES
AN ORGY OF GRAY-HAIRED MEN, CALLOW YOUTHS, GAMBLERS, ROUGHS, AND PAINTED WOMEN—GENERAL DRUNKENNESS—FIGHTS AT INTERVALS—IT WAS VICE’S
* Day invented the Help Wanted and Classifieds sections around this time. It was a highly effective way to drive daily sales.
* In other words, we’ve been tearing down public figures on bogus charges for more than a century. Do yourself a favor and look up the Fatty Arbuckle scandal for a sobering look at One-Off consequences.
* RSS readers Bloglines and NewsGator are in the deadpool. Apple’s Mountain Lion OS X doesn’t include RSS, and Google no longer features Reader in its top-level navigation. The latest versions of the Firefox browser don’t even have RSS buttons. Twitter and Facebook both stopped supporting direct RSS feeds. And the death of RSS has been heralded in a million headlines.
IX
TACTIC #6
MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE
FOR MEDIA THAT LIVES AND DIES BY CLICKS (THE ONE-Off Problem) it all comes down to the headline. It’s what catches the attention of the public—yelled by a newsboy or seen on a search engine. In a one-off world there is nothing more important than the pitch to prospective buyers. And they need many exciting new pitches every day, each louder and more compelling than the last. Even if reality is not so interesting.
That’s where I come in. I make up the news; blogs make up the headline.
Although it seems easy, headline writing is an incredibly difficult task. The editor has to reduce an entire story down to just a few units of text—turning a few hundred- or thousand-word piece into just a few words, period. In the process it must express the article’s central ideas in an exciting way.
According to Gabriel Snyder, the former managing editor of Gawker Media and now an editor at the traffic powerhouse TheAtlantic.com , blog headlines are “naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.” Readers and revenue depend on the headline’s ability to win this fight.
In the days of the yellow press the front pages of the World and the Journal went head to head every day, driving each other to greater and greater extremes. As a publisher, William Randolph Hearst obsessed over his headlines, tweaking their wording, writing and rewriting them, riding his editors until they were perfect. Each one, he thought, could steal another one hundred readers away from another paper. 1
It worked. As a young man Upton Sinclair remembered hearing the newsboys shouting “Extra!” and saw the headline “War Declared!” splashed across the front page of Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. He parted with his hard-earned pennies and read eagerly, only to find something rather different between what he’d thought and what he’d bought. It was actually: “War (may be) Declared (soon).” 2
They won, he lost. That same hustle happens online every day. Each blog is competing not just to be the leader on a particular story but against all the other topics a reader could potentially commit to reading about (and also against checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and watching videos, or even pornography). So here we are in 2012, on our fancy MacBooks and wireless Internet, stuck again with the same bogus headlines we had in the nineteenth century.
From today: *
Naked Lady Gaga Talks Drugs and Celibacy
Hugh Hefner: I Am Not a Sex Slave Rapist in a Palace of Poop
The Top Nine Videos of Babies Farting and/or Laughing with Kittens
How Justin Bieber Caught a Contagious Syphilis Rumor
WATCH: Heartbroken Diddy Offers to Expose Himself to Chelsea Handler
Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life
Penguin Shits on Senate Floor
Now compare those to some of these classic headlines from 1898 to 1903:
WAR WILL BE DECLARED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES
AN ORGY OF GRAY-HAIRED MEN, CALLOW YOUTHS, GAMBLERS, ROUGHS, AND PAINTED WOMEN—GENERAL DRUNKENNESS—FIGHTS AT INTERVALS—IT WAS VICE’S
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