Convergence Culture: A new media trend means journalists' pay is dictated by how popular they are, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
You might think the idea of popularity is one that could never change.
People are popular for a number of reasons and all of them are positive: good looks, a sense of humour, a pleasant disposition, or strong leadership qualities. The web, of course, changes that.
Imagine a world where journalists are paid according to how popular they are, measured simply by how many people read them. This idea introduces a notion of popularity that is quite different from, say, one that relies on judging the popularity of bands through DVD sales.
It shifts the idea of popularity away from the purely positive. People read a journalist for a number of reasons and one of them might be because the writer is deliberately controversial or is highly principled and potentially unpopular because of that.
People, anyway, end up reading, in small numbers, writers who are articulate, accurate and even wise.
The internet, though, subsumes concepts such as wisdom, contentiousness, principles, ethics and other nuances under the idea of popularity as measured by visitors or readers. The practice now extends to the sphere of news and reportage.
It is six months since American business magazine Business 2.0introduced payments for journalists based on the number of visitors a journalist received on the Business 2.0website.
In April their first bonuses were announced. Some ran into the thousands of dollars.
While this is a rare example of payment by results in the news world, many news organisations have introduced similar ideas with non-professional writers. Blogburst, for example, is a website that markets blog-posts to newspapers and news agencies.
A new service at Insightcommunity.com pays bloggers for providing advice to companies. It works like this. A company such as Volkswagen might want to know what a new design concept from BMW really means to the future sales of its mid-range cars. Volkswagen anonymously posts that question onto Insightcommunity.com, which then invites qualified bloggers (those who regularly write about cars) to give their views.
The problem is Blogburst only pays the top 100 bloggers as ranked each month by page views and Insightcommunity pays only the top three per question, as ranked by popularity. In both cases payments are small, amounting to roughly $100-$150.
This puts the onus on writers to become "popular". There is a saying in the web world which goes: if you want people to read your blog, write what other people are writing. So, rule number one, blogs tend to aggregate opinion around a limited number of subjects. Writing what others write increases the likelihood that your blog will be linked to by other bloggers, because you are in the same conversation.
Technorati.com is a website that measures how many times a blog is linked to by other blogs, the idea being that the most-linked blogs have the highest reputation and are therefore the best. Insightcommunity draws on this to help decide who it pays.
Let's review the dangers. Already we've seen it tends to encourage people to write about the same things. Another way to attract links is to make a controversial statement so it can encourage link-baiting, namely making statements that are not authentic or strongly held to draw people into linking to you.
You can begin to see a pattern. Popularity and reputation, when they are measured by machines, invite manipulation by humans.
The manipulation involves the skewing of viewpoints to attract attention and it has the potential to narrow debate by encouraging writers to "herd".
ON THE OTHER SIDEof this equation, new media organisations are looking to strike deals that put a strict limit on the funds available for content, while at the same time looking to maximise the amount of content they create.
Media enterprises such as Blogburst and Insightcommunity can deal in hundreds and thousands of viewpoints but pay only for a small amount of them. The rest is for free. These systems are voluntary and can hardly be accused of exploiting people. They exploit people's desire to be heard, which is fair game. Nonetheless, you can see the temptation for writers to tie their opinions very closely to popularity and share in the limited financial rewards.
Technorati, which stands astride the blog world and attracts 10 million unique visits a month, has just bought Personalbee, a provider of software for creating news magazines from blogging. Expect to see a raft of new online newspapers.
The question is, will they draw on the limiting mechanics of the blogosphere or will new editorial values emerge?
WORDS IN YOUR EAR
Link-baiting- the practice of making statements in a website or blog primarily to attract links from others
Page rank- a measure by the search engine Google to indicate a website or blog's popularity
Page view- the number of times a webpage or blog post is viewed by a reader
