Early last month, a lion known as Cecil was killed by a hunter near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.
The first international news articles on his death appeared in mid-July. By the end of the month, once it had emerged that the man who killed Cecil was an American dentist, the global news media had claimed its own trophy.
The phrase “Cecil the lion” now returns about 3.2 million Google News results. Among those are celebrity takes (“Jean-Claude Van Damme Responds to Cecil the Lion Outrage”), emotional takes (“Like All Lions, Cecil Had a Huge Capacity to Love”) and contrarian takes (“Eating Chicken Is Morally Worse Than Killing Cecil the Lion”). There were local takes, millennial takes, arguments that other global concerns were more pressing, roundups of previous stories and condemnations of the amount of coverage. (Not to mention articles like this one.)
More than 2,100 articles had been posted to Facebook by mid-August, according to data from the social media tracking firm CrowdTangle, wher they were shared about 3.6 million times, and liked 1.3 million times. According to Twitter, mentions of Cecil peaked at nearly 900 tweets a minute, for a total of more than three million.
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The effect, for online readers, was inundation. And it was far from the first time. Recent stories about Rachel Dolezal, a woman who was born to white parents but came to identify herself as black and lead an N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and a dress that appeared different colors to different people have spawned their own mini-industries.
Since the days when most major cities supported multiple newspapers, the news media has long been subject to groupthink, and prone to search for sensation. But as more readers move toward online social networks, and as publishers desperately seek scale to bring in revenue, many have deplored a race toward repetitive, trivial journalism, so noisy that it drowns out more considered work.
Reading disposable web journalism is “like eating a whole bag of Doritos,” Joshua Topolsky, a founder of the technology website The Verge, said in an interview. “You look up and think, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Mr. Topolsky recently left his job overseeing Bloomberg’s web properties, and afterward posted an essay that in part expressed frustration with what is published online.
He is not alone. In recent weeks, there have been complaints from various corners of the media world that online news has deteriorated, and that it is now focused on the viral at the expense of the substantive.
Others are not nearly as troubled.
“I like Doritos,” said Kevin Merida, a managing editor of The Washington Post, which has two reporting teams that monitor and react to stories that seem to be gaining attention on the web and social media. He added: “We’re in the business of people reading our work. If we were to ignore the information that people are talking about, we would be news snobs.”
Danny Shea, editorial director of The Huffington Post, said he felt that “digital media de-emphasizes the value of the commodity story and encourages journalists to add value.” To see it otherwise, he said, “implies that the media are passive observers rather than active participants who can do something about it.”
Most within the industry prefer to talk about the top third of the iceberg: the substantive, original work that both old and new media pursue. And most agree, at least, that news organizations must now aim to reach the widest possible audience. Even outlets, like The New York Times, with robust online subscription bases must increase their audiences on the web and try to convert more to paying readers. For newspapers and magazines, which must make up for increasing losses in print advertising and circulation, the need is even more urgent.
That, Mr. Topolsky said, means that the news industry must churn out stories that are the equivalent of blockbuster superhero franchises, with mass-audience appeal, but light on nuance and creative risk.
“I think that we have, in trying to attack the totality of possible eyeballs on the Internet, lost the things that make publications great,” he said.
The shift is, perhaps inevitably, rooted in money. According to Brian Wieser, a web, advertising and media analyst at Pivotal Research Group, and a former advertising agency executive, in the early days of the web, publications operated much as they always had — selling advertising space to companies, person to person. “Then, of course, we got to the nuclear meltdown era, the vast wasteland,” he said.
Some advertising executives realized that the same people who were browsing the websites of glossy magazines were also buying pet food online, Mr. Wieser said. So why should the magazine sell its advertising at a higher rate, when companies could develop technology to track potential customers, and target them wherver they browsed online? That process became automated, and now many ads on the web are served, via algorithms, by specialized exchanges wher they are bought and sold in bulk at steeply discounted rates. “The economics of producing original content, and the value of being associated with it, diminished,” he said.
Publishers, who used to get print sales prices and premium advertising dollars for every reader, now get cents or fractions of cents in revenue for the same reader. Many have grown more aggressive with their advertising tactics. According to research by Facebook, news pages, often heavy with advertising, take an average of eight seconds to load, the longest for any kind of content. That can feel like a lifetime to a smartphone user seeking a quick glimpse of the news while waiting in line or commuting. When readers finally arrive at the story, they must steel themselves for a fight — to dismiss pleadings to subscribe or register, or to shut down advertisements that play automatically, by touching a tiny, moving “X” with the fingertip precision of a surgeon.
At the same time, every publication now requires a greater number of readers to make ends meet. And perhaps the greatest potential resource are the billions who have turned to social media as a faster portal for information. That means journalists must now compete with entertainment, quizzes, gossip and baby pictures.
The weapon of choice is often emotion. Specialists optimize and test multiple headlines and pictures. If they land on a successful formula — asking a provocative question, hinting at a profound experience, including a celebrity name — it is quickly echoed by other outlets.
It is hard to separate human behavior from the behavior of the algorithms that drive Facebook and Google, said Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University who has done research on social and information networks. But some research has suggested that the web might just be recording existing aspects of human behavior. Undigested comments that people might have made to colleagues or friends but later thought better of are now written down as journalism, and “get indexed and archived in the same way as a serious news story.” It is a phenomenon that is seen across the web, Mr. Kleinberg said.
“It makes visible and searchable what was once ephemeral,” he said.
For Mr. Merida, the Washington Post editor, being aware of that kind of ephemera does not preclude deeper journalistic efforts. He said that his newspaper does difficult, expensive reporting on topics like the Islamic State, and on the impact of heroin, stories that find substantial audiences despite the noise online.
“It’s not a conflict to also be in the game of, conversations are happening, people are checking their phones, they’re talking about things, they like to access social media, they’re using new apps,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with being part of that world.”
