Journalism becoming a consumer product – 01/07/2008 – MiamiHerald.com
Thanks to Romensko for pointing out today that Edward Wasserman writes in the Miami Herald:
“That direction seems to be toward handing over tighter and much more precise influence over editorial content to the outside people who write the checks. If she’s right about the reasons for her dismissal, Trunk has become an early casualty of the new order of online news — calibrated journalism.”
Taken in the light of the bonus structure at blog-based journalism enterprises such as Gawker, and the purported obsession with bylines and pageviews at Forbes.com, the tyranny of metrics has firmly spilled into the newsroom. This is bad. This pushes enterprise reporting into the realm of chasing traffic.