Open question to y’all: where did the last wave of data-based journalism go wrong (if it went wrong at all)? Were the problems avoidable? What would you want to see done differently?
kontextmaschine said: it was already wrong before vox, it was still good after yglesias left thinkprogress. Maybe when 538 got bought out by the NYT?
That does seem to bound the period when something started to ~feel~ off.xhxhxhx said: what’s wrong with data journalism? did something happen?
Data journalism itself is maybe fine. What passes itself off as data journalism less so. IMO what we’re seeing is the Discovery Channel-ification of data journalism, as brands like Ezra Klein gradually sell out in terms of wonkish quality to get more hits (is Vox making money or are they just remaining afloat?) while smaller publications (The Monkey Cage at WaPo?) fill in the gaps, perhaps to repeat the cycle later.
I’m not sure this whole process has done much to improve the world, though.
Vox Media has 65 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore. That’s less than the New York Times (78 million), the Washington Post (73 million), and
the Daily Mail (71 million), and comparable to and Fox News (64 million).
But that’s mostly the company’s sports brand, SN Nation. Vox Media claims 170 million unique visitors per month, of which more than half are SB Nation’s 83 million uniques. Vox.com has 21 million.
Vox.com was the 10th most-viewed digital native news brand in January 2015, when it could claim 13.6 million monthly uniques. But that number has been growing.
Vox Media has certainly been successful at attracting outside investment. There was that $46.5 million equity purchase at a $380 million valuation in November 2014. In August 2015, there was NBC Universal’s $200 million equity purchase at a $850 million valuation, or perhaps a $1 billion valuation.
NBCU wanted access to a millennial audience, and Vox Media’s digital content and distribution tools. Vox Media had an audience that was young, affluent, educated and digital. NBCU had money. The two together could promise advertisers an environment that would be premium-safe: real people, not bots, would see these ads.
But premium-safe meant more than real impressions. It meant narrative and experiential advertising, the brand-building that television and magazine advertisers had always been better at.
Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told AdWeek that the digital space had never been as good as television at creating an experience and telling marketers’ stories. Now he could promise them something different: “beautiful advertising that performs well for them that doesn’t irritate—and actually delights—the audience in a way that a great television or magazine ad would”.
Vox’s digital advertising inventory would be open. NBCU would offer its clients the choice to make buys on NBCU alone, or on Vox brands as well. And Vox would manage those buys through its proprietary inventory management system, Concert. Bankoff told AdWeek that Concert could promise upwards of 12 times the performance rate on standard metrics, whether viewability or clickthrough.
Digital management and analytics have always been a part of the Vox pitch. Ezra Klein joined Vox Media in part because Vox’s content management system was just better. Matthew Yglesias prefers it too. And Klein and Yglesias both seem to trust what the metrics are telling them.
Vox.com’s programming reflects the metrics . And what the metrics are saying is this: identity sells. Traditional data journalism doesn’t.
The fact that social media responds so powerfully to content about race, gender, sexuality, etc is, to me, a signal that these kinds of identities shape people’s experiences even more strongly than I thought, and as an editor, I need to think hard about whether we’re covering them enough.
That’s also what Klein said on Product Hunt Maker Stories, at about 59 minutes in:
We’re very attuned to what is happening on social media. One thing that social media has taught us is basically the fundamental lesson that a lot of people have taken from social, it’s the fundamental insight of Buzzfeed – is that identity-oriented content really blows up online. …
How much people cared about stories that touched on these aspects of their lives was more significant than people realize. … That is changing what the media cares about and what it covers. And it’s changing it in a way that’s much more connected to what the audience cares about and what the audience wants covered.
That’s what drives coverage that is dumbed-down. That’s what drives coverage that is optimized to make people angry or to make them inspired. That’s what drives coverage on microaggressions.
Ezra Klein thinks that’s better than what came before.
I don’t for a minute suppose that the topics we had decided were serious topics – tax policy instead of police brutality against the African American community – I don’t for a second think that we had the weights on that right.
That’s what the metrics said. That’s what the audience wants. That’s what they responds to. That’s what they like, share, and follow. And for Klein, there is progressive virtue in following the metrics:
[This is] a place where privilege really does matter. There are some debates that have become normalized in American politics and we all agree these are Serious debates to be having. So on tax policy, the underlying values questions are well understood and well sorted so we can move onto technocratic arguments about how to achieve goals. Then there are other issues where a lot of people don’t even recognize there’s an issue (transgender discrimination, say) and so the arguments are different and more values based and less technocratic and so it’s easier to dismiss them. But that’s a kind of status quo bias that simply benefits those whose issues are well recognized by the status quo.
That’s what makes Vox a valuable property, after all.
(Source: femmenietzsche, via femmenietzsche)