Pop Goes the Digital Media Bubble
Warning: this leads into the latest Mother Jones begathon, however there are salient facts regarding the state of journalism and digital advertising today before you get there.
Look at it this way: A reporter doing even modestly original work might produce five stories a week (and that’s not allowing for anything more than a few phone calls and a couple of rounds of editing per piece). If each of those stories gets, on average, 50,000 readers, and each of those page views generates $0.01 (again, a very generous rate), you’ll end up grossing $2,500 a week, or $130,000 a year, with which you’ll have to pay the reporter and her editor, their benefits, web tech, sales and ops staff, taxes, insurance, electricity, rent, laptops, phones…
And this calculus assumes a brutal pace of hour-by-hour filing and publishing, with journalists constantly looking over their shoulder at the traffic numbers. (When a New York Daily News editor was fired last week for dropping attributions from columnist Shaun King’s stories, he noted that he was expected to process 20 stories from five reporters each day.) And the kind of digging that an investigative story requires—months of research and reporting, plus fact-checking, editing, and maybe multimedia production—forget it. The math just doesn’t work.