One of my goals for the coming year is to pay way less attention to what gets posted on Gawker.com. It’s as addictive as all those salty snacks—Doritos, Pringles, Cheetos (D’oh, Cheetos!)—that nutritionist warn us against ingesting, but we do anyway. It’s a guilty, unhealthy pleasure. But every now and then I’ll read something there that’s eye opening, based on actual reporting.
Such is the case today. Check out Ryan Tate’s post The Culture of Fear Inflames the Financial Wires, which follows up his earlier account of the new performance metrics introduced into the Bloomberg newsroom. The news service’s editorial employees are now being professionally evaluated—and financially rewarded—on how many Breaking News Points™ they to accumulate for each of the scoops and exclusives they break. Basically, the news service is handing out gold stars to reporters based upon a dubious, inhouse-developed metric.
Not surprisingly, many Bloomberg employees have learned to game the system and make themselves shine on paper. As Tate noted in his post Wednesday, after the new metrics were introduced “reporters magically produced nearly three times as many scoops in one quarter of 2009 as they had in all of 2008.”
Today, Tate writes that Reuters has its own counterpart to Bloomberg’s scoop-o-meter. Known as Beats and Exclusives, it is being used this year for the first time to evaluate journalists’ productivity. And the impact internally has been about the same:
The abuse we’re told is rampant under the Reuters “Beats and Exclusives” system should only get worse now that money is involved. Our source:
The people who actually file [“Beats and Exclusives” notes] tend to shamelessly game the system by trying to get credit for non-news that no other outlet had or cared about or for “exclusive” executive interviews that broke zero ground. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen now, when jobs and pay are on the line. (Emphasis added).
This is what happens when you import inappropriate performance metrics from Wall Street or the factory floor into a newsroom. A few months ago, a member of Sam Zell’s team, which has deftly managed the Tribune Company into Chapter 11, even suggested judging individual newspaper reporter’s productivity based upon the sheer number of words they pounded out over the course of a quarter or year. So much for striving to write tight and bright copy.
Quality journalism requires the investment of substantial time and is labor intensive. Real scoops are usually the result of arduous leg work, developing new sources and painstakingly winning their trust, and confirming and corroborating what they say with independent authorities. And sometimes promising leads don’t pan out. As the legendary, late newspaper editor Jim Bellows used to say, commentary is cheap, reporting is expensive.
On the other hand, performance-boosting schemes like those at Bloomberg and Reuters don’t produce more news, but rather more news flavor. Similarly, my favorite Cheetos (D’oh, Cheetos!) may contain no real cheese, but still manage to pack plenty of lip-smacking cheese flavor.
In either case, the end result is the same: empty calories, no fiber, and a slightly queasy feeling.
Brave New Whirl 