Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Read online

  Nick Denton of Gawker is also a prolific investor in his own space, often putting money in companies founded by employees who left his company or were fired. He has stakes in several local blog networks, such as Curbed, that are often linked to or written about on his larger sites. By shuffling users around to two sites he can charge advertisers twice. Denton also invested in the site Cityfile, which he was able to pump up with traffic from his other blogs before acquiring it outright and rolling it back into Gawker.

  Influence is ultimately the goal of most blogs and blog publishers, because that influence can be sold to a larger media company. But, as Arrington and Denton show, influence can also be abused for profit through strategic investments—be it in the companies they write about or where they decide to send monetizeable traffic. And, of course, these are only the conflicts of interest blatant enough to be discovered by the public. Who knows what else goes on behind the curtain?

  ENTER: THE MANIPULATOR

  Bloggers eager to build names and publishers eager to sell their blogs are like two crooked businessmen colluding to create interest in a bogus investment opportunity—building up buzz and clearing town before anyone gets wise. In this world, where the rules and ethics are lax, a third player can exert massive influence. Enter: the media manipulator.

  The assumptions of blogging and their owners present obvious vulnerabilities that people like me exploit. They allow us to control what is in the media, because the media is too busy chasing profits to bother trying to stop us. They are not motivated to care. Their loyalty is not to their audience but to themselves and their con. While ultimately this is reason to despair, I have found one small solace: Conning the conmen is one of life’s most satisfying pleasures. And it’s not even hard.

  In the next chapters I will outline how to do this and how it is being done. I have broken down the manipulation of blogs into nine effective tactics. Each exposes a pathetic vulnerability in our media system—each, when wielded properly, levels the playing field and gives you free rein to control the flow of information on the web.

  * Exclusives, as they are called, are important for another reason. Advertising a story as an exclusive by extension takes a dig at a publication’s competitors: “We got this story and they didn’t—because we’re better.” This is partly why a site would rather post a weak exclusive on its front page than a more interesting story they’ve been forced to share with others.

  IV

  TACTIC #1

  BLOGGERS ARE POOR; HELP PAY THEIR BILLS

  THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO GIVE SOMEONE A BRIBE. Very rarely does it mean handing them a stack of bills. You use this logic and the criteria that bloggers’ employers use to determine the size of their paycheck—the stuff bloggers are paid for—can be co-opted and turned into an indirect bribe. These levers were easy enough for me to find, and properly identified and wielded, they turned out to be as effective as any overt payoff.

  It begins with how these bloggers are hired. Put aside any notion that applicants are chosen based on skill, integrity, or a love of their craft. Ben Parr, editor at large at the popular technology blog Mashable, was once asked what he looked for when he hired writers for his blogs. His answer was one word: quickness. “Online journalism is fast-paced,” he explained. “We need people that can get the story out in minutes and can compose the bigger opinion pieces in a couple hours, not a couple of days.” As to any actual experience in journalism, that would be considered only “a definite plus.”1

  The payment structure of blogging reflects this emphasis on speed over other variables, such as quality, accuracy, or how informative the content might be. Early on blogs tended to pay their writers a rate per post or a flat rate with a minimum number of posts required per day. Engadget, Slashfood, Autoblog, and other sites run by Weblogs, Inc. paid bloggers a reported five hundred dollars a month in 2005 for 125 posts—or four dollars a post, four per day.2 Gawker paid writers twelve dollars a post as late as 2008. And of course these rates don’t include the other duties bloggers are stuck with, such editing, responding to e-mails, and writing comments. Professional blogging is done in the boiler room, and it is brutal.

  Gawker set the curve for the industry again when they left the pay-per-post model and switched to a pageview-based compensation system that gave bonuses to writers based on their monthly traffic figures. These bonuses came on top of a set monthly pay, meaning that bloggers were eligible for payments that could effectively double their salary once they hit their monthly quota. You can imagine what kind of results this led to. I recall a post from a Gawker writer whining about how he didn’t know how much money he’d make that month—and getting seventeen thousand views for it.

  The bonus system was so immediately rewarding for Gawker bloggers that the company tweaked their ratio to deemphasize the bonus slightly. The system remains, however, and today the company has a big board in its offices that shows the stats for all the writers and their stories. When writers aren’t fighting for bonuses, all they have to do is look up to be reminded: If you’re at the bottom of the board, you might get fired.

  This is now the standard model for blogs. Forbes.com was relaunched with hundreds of blogger contributors who are paid per visitor. Seeking Alpha, a network of financial writers (arguably worth a lot to its investor-type readers), launched a payment platform in 2010 that pays writers based on the traffic their posts generate. The average payment per article turned out to be only fifty-eight dollars for the first six months. A writer needs to rack up roughly one hundred thousand views to make even one thousand dollars—a tough fight when you’re jostling for share of voice against the thousand-plus writers who publish there each month. The blog The Awl announced it would also start paying its writers using a similar model two years after its founding. A dozen or so bloggers split a small pool of revenue generated by advertisements on the site. The more traffic the site does, the larger the pool. It’s the same incentive—desperately dependent on big hits—but instead of fighting each other for pageviews, they’re all in on the hustle together.3

  Business Insider, run by Henry Blodget, is barely breaking even, so they don’t have much to pay their writers. Earlier experiments with highly paid, experienced journalists failed to work. When he does pay his writers, Blodget has a fairly simple rule of thumb: Writers need to generate three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting, and Blodget’s cut. In other words, an employee making $60,000 a year needs to produce 1.8 million pageviews a month, every month, or they’re out.4 This is no easy task.

  Google and YouTube pay their video bloggers solely on how many views they get, once they have been verified as a “quality” producer. In other cases Google will green-light just one hit video from an account and allow that to be monetized. YouTube sells and serves the ads, takes a substantial cut, and passes the rest on. Most of these figures are not public, but a decent account can hope to make about one penny per view, or one dollar for every thousand.

  I remember working with the very popular multiplatinum rock band Linkin Park and realizing their account, which had done over one hundred million views, would earn them barely six figures—to be split among six guys, a manager, a lawyer, and a record label. These kinds of rates force channels big and small to churn out videos constantly to make money. Every view is only a penny in their pocket.

  Twitter users are straight-up mercenary. Through various ad networks you can actually pay influential accounts to tweet a message of your choosing. And by message, I mean that they will tweet anything.

  In order to promote one of Tucker’s books I got a Twitter account with more than four hundred thousand followers to say: “FACT: People will do anything for money”—for twenty-five dollars. For a few hundred dollars more I tricked dozens of other accounts into posting humiliating promotional messages that pushed the book to a number two debut on the New York Times bestseller list. One blog headline summed it up
well: “Tucker Max Proves You Can Pay Celebrities To Tweet Whatever You Want.”5

  Other companies, such as Demand Media, Associated Content, and examiner.com, have revived the earlier payment model and typically pay their writers on a per post and per video basis. The figure for text tends to hover around eight dollars, and slightly more for video.

  If all these numbers sound small—and they do to me—it isn’t simply because bloggers are getting shafted. It’s because what they produce isn’t worth all that much. Political analyst Nate Silver estimated that the median user-contributed article on the Huffington Post is worth only three dollars in revenue to the company.6 So even if they were paid fairly for their contributions, it wouldn’t be much of a paycheck. Silver looked at high-profile articles by former U.S. secretary of labor Robert Reich that did 547 comments and 27,000 pageviews and concluded that they’d be worth only about two hundred dollars—an amount for which a man like that usually wouldn’t get out of bed. Most articles from the currently unpaid contributors generate significantly less revenue than that.

  RIPE FOR EXPLOITATION

  All this means that if bloggers want to get rich—or even cover their rent—they’ve got to find other ways to get paid. That’s where people like me come in—with boatloads of free stuff.

  One of the quickest ways to get coverage for a product online is to give it away for free to bloggers (they’ll rarely disclose their conflict of interest). At American Apparel I have two full-time employees whose job it is to research fashion bloggers—girls who post photos of their outfits each day to thousands of readers who imitate them—and send them our newest garments. I would offer an affiliate ad deal to the most popular girls that would pay them a commission each time someone bought something from our site after seeing their photos. I’m sure you’re shocked to read how often their posts featured something from American Apparel.

  When I promoted movies, tours of the set or invitations to the premiere worked wonders in getting blog coverage. When I worked with bands, concert tickets, or even just an e-mail from the artist, can make most blogs star-struck enough to give you what you need. And that’s nothing compared to what Samsung did: As an advertiser on Business Insider, Samsung paid for a Business Insider staffer to go to Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress. Thankfully, the writer disclosed this relationship. But in that very disclosure, he cops to feeling “pretty warm and fuzzy about Samsung” as a result of the generous offer. In my line of work, it’s all about encouraging those feelings however possible.7

  But this is just free swag and perks. The easiest way for bloggers to make real money is to transition to a job with an old media company or a tech company. They can build a name and sell it to a sucker, just like their owners and investors are trying to do. Once a blogger builds a personal brand—through scoops or controversy or major stories—they can expect a cushy job at a magazine or start-up desperate for the credibility and buzz that these attributes offer. These lagging companies can then tell shareholders, “See, we’re current!” or “We’re turning things around!”

  Tony Pierce, a founding editor of LAist, a local blog about Los Angeles, left it to head up the digital efforts for the Los Angeles Times. CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy turned in her blogging gig for a job at Google as a trend analyst. Yahoo!, in its days as a media company, hired a whole slew of bloggers away from their website, including reporters from Defamer and Movieline.com, The Awl, and others. Reporter John Cook left the Chicago Tribune to join Gawker, left Gawker to join Yahoo!, and then left Yahoo! to return to Gawker, all in less than two years. A former editor of Engadget, Joshua Topolsky, is a regular guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. The founding editor of Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox, is the queen of the revolving door; she turned her few years as a blogging celebrity into stints editing or reporting for Time.com, MSNBC, Air America, and Playboy.

  This revolving door has a peculiar influence on coverage, as is to be expected. What blogger is going to do real reporting on companies like Google, Facebook, or Twitter when there is the potential for a lucrative job down the road? They’d prefer to play it safe and build their name through any means but being a reliable journalist.

  For my part, I’ve lost track of the bloggers whose names I have helped make by giving them big stories (favorable and to my liking) and watched transition into bigger gigs at magazines, newspapers, and editorships at major blogs. In fact, the other day I was driving in Los Angeles and noticed a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard with nothing but a large face on it: the face of a video blogger who I’d started giving free clothes to back when his videos did a few thousand views apiece. Now his videos do millions of views, and he has a show on HBO. If you invest early in a blogger, you can buy your influence very cheaply.

  In most cases, they know what I am doing and don’t care. If blog publishers are constantly looking for an exit, then their bloggers are too. They both want money from the same big media companies. They don’t care if the scandals they write about are real or made up, or if their sources are biased or self-serving—as long as the blogger gets something out of it.

  THE REAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST

  We take it as self-evident that journalists shouldn’t be paid off by people they write about or have financial investments (like owning a stock they’re reporting on) in their field. The conflict would shape the coverage and corrupt their writing. So for a second I was pleasantly surprised to read pretty much that exact sentiment in a post by Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan titled “New Rules for Media Ethics.” He said it plainly: “Media people—reporter, commentator, or otherwise—shouldn’t have a financial stake in what they’re reporting on.”

  But then I realized how hypocritical it all was, since Nolan is being paid by how many views his posts do. His financial interest isn’t in what he writes about but in how he writes. In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest. It’s why I’ve never bought influence directly. I’ve never had to. Bloggers have a direct incentive to write bigger, to write simpler, to write more controversially or, conversely, more favorably, to write without having to do any work, to write more often than is warranted. Their paycheck depends on it. It’s no wonder they are vicious, irresponsible, inaccurate, and dishonest.

  They call it a “digital sweatshop” for good reason. “Ceaseless fight for table scraps” might be another phrase for it. Or in the immortal words of Henry Kissinger: The reason the knives are so sharp online is because the pie is so small.

  V

  TACTIC #2

  TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR

  THE PROBLEM OF JOURNALISM, SAYS EDWARD JAY Epstein in his book Between Fact and Fiction, is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.

  Who are these self-interested sources? Well, anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda. People like me.

  When the New York Times publishes leaked documents there is an implicit understanding that they have at least attempted to verify their validity. The same goes for the identity of the source who gave it to them. Online, anonymous means something else entirely. Quotes and tips are drawn from unsolicited, untraced e-mails or angry comments pulled from comments sections, or sent in by people who have something to gain from it. I know, because I have been this kind of source dozens of times, and it was never for anything important. My identity is never verified.

  Today, the online-driven news cycle is going a million miles a minute in a million directions. The New York Times may still try to verify their sources, but it hardly matters, because no one else does. This creates endless opportunities for people like me to slip in and twist things to my liking. As Epstein said, the discrepancy between what actually happened and the versi
on of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area. Of all such areas, it’s where I have the most fun and direct influence.

  THE DELIBERATE LEAK

  Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a “memo we’d just gotten from our boss.” The same bloggers who were uninterested in the facts when I informed them directly gladly put up EXCLUSIVE! and LEAKED! posts about it. They could tell my side of the story because I told it to them in words they wanted to hear. More people saw it than ever would have had I issued an “official statement.”

  Another time I had some promotional images for a Halloween campaign I also couldn’t use, because of copyright concerns. I still wanted them seen, so I had one of my employees e-mail them to Jezebel and Gawker and write, “I shouldn’t be doing this but I found some secret images on the American Apparel server and here they were.” The post based on this lie did ninety thousand views. The writer wrote back a helpful tip: No need to leak me info from your company e-mail address; you might get caught. I thought, but how else could she be sure they were real?

  It was funny at the time. Then a few months later, a U.S. congressman allegedly exchanged e-mails with a girl on craigslist and sent her a shirtless photo of himself. The girl forwarded this photo and the incriminating e-mail correspondence that supposedly occurred along with them to Gawker (which owns Jezebel). Gawker posted it, and the congressman immediately resigned.