Own Your Own Content Farm, By Brian McFadden
“Watch them aggregate! See them summarize! Feed them keywords to generate page views!”
Nailed it.
I once talked to my editor at Finger Lakes Community Newspapers (the ultra-local branch of the Ithaca Times that was delegated to the rundown basement of the company building) about how things are changing now that we’re accessing our news online instead of getting it from print sources.
She posited the interesting theory that our online reading habits are dramatically reshaping the way we process information. When people used to read the paper in pre-internet days, she said, all the information they had access to was there in their hands on that stack of low-grade newsprint. They could read the news articles and op eds or they could put the paper down and not read at all.
But if you run across something you disagree with or something that unsettles you while on your computer, you simply hit “Close Tab” and move on to another source of information.
My editor argued that because of this shift, people’s opinions are becoming more polarized and we’re growing more partisan, extreme, and vitriolic (remember when the media kept saying “vitriol” all the time after the Tucson shootings? It’s weird how they latch onto words like that). Which is scary.
So that was the biggest change she’d noticed. Now that I work in online media, I’d have to say that my answer to the “How have things changed?” question would have to be that SEO is ruining everything.
SEO calls for the habitual sacrifice of factual accuracy, grammatical correctness, long-held AP conventions, and dynamic editorial decisions—but in addition to stomping on everything great about traditional journalism, it makes room for trashy content farms like eHow and Associated Content.
Which is a long way of saying I find this comic both entertaining and terrifying.
