Cats vs. sloths -- is this the future of online journalism?

 

Folks, I hate to say it, but this may be the future of online journalism.

A guy named Neetzan Zimmerman at one of the nation’s most popular websites, Gawker, is gaining adulation online from those countless bloggers and wannabes who spend long hours every day hoping for big “hits” on their site.

Farhad Manjoo of the Wall Street Journal glorifies Zimmerman’s superficial exploits in a post under this secondary headline:  “A Gawker Editor Tells How He Picks 'Viral' Content Readers Can't Resist Sharing.”

Going viral, of course, means that an online item has been shared by friends of friends of friends of friends – on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever.
In fact, Manjoo jumps face first into the fluff by putting this main headline on his piece: “Why Everyone Will Totally Read This Column”

Manjoo reports this:

“Mr. Zimmerman is a 32-year-old editor at the news-and-entertainment site Gawker, where he's responsible for posting ‘viral’ content—videos, photos, crazy local news stories—that readers can't resist sharing with everyone they know. 'Mom Fined $140 Every Day Until She Circumcises Her Child’or ‘Black Man Arrested Dozens of Times for Trespassing While At Work.’ With his posts generating more than 30 million page views a month, Mr. Zimmerman may be the most popular blogger working on the Web today.

“Because he's constantly scrutinizing his traffic to figure out why certain posts do well and others don't, Mr. Zimmerman also keeps a running list of ‘hot’ themes in his head.
"’It might be that right now, people don't care about stories about cats that much, and instead, sloths are more popular,’ he says. ‘So I'll have a rule—cats are out, sloths are in, focus on sloths because that's going to be your meal ticket.’

“While machines have lots of data, Mr. Zimmerman says they wouldn't be very good, yet, at intuiting subtle, collective changes in human preferences as quickly as he can. ‘I'm following the big story arcs online, like in a soap opera,’ he says. ‘Like within a trend of cats, different cats will have moments where they're popular: Grumpy Cat is not popular now, but maybe it's Lil Bub.’ Zimmerman doesn't track this with a spreadsheet or any formal system. He just sort of feels the changes, on a day-to-day basis, as the viral news turns.”

Grumpy cat? Sloths? Circumcisions?

It seems such a long time ago that one of the biggest concerns about journalism was a White House press corps that served as “stenographers” and completely missed the story about the phony reasons for the Iraq War.