Why Crap Gets Read And Real News Doesn’t: The Inherent Dilemma Of Writing For Page Views

Professional writers write for money. A very rare, and very fortunate, few freelancers are making serious coin writing only serious material.

Dedicated and amateur bloggers can become financially wildly successful if they persist and draw enormous audiences.

But who, beyond the elite troops of paid on-line journalism veterans like ProPublica, (and the on-line versions of old-school newspapers and newsmagazines) will actually cover anything serious?

SHOOT: Excellent piece which raises the sceptre, the driver really, of the dumbing down of our society. What's popular isn't always good for us, not indvidually or even as a society.

clipped from trueslant.com Why producing serious journalism and writing for the Web are contradictory impulses. An intelligent — and deeply depressing to old-school journos like me — analysis from Silicon Valley Watcher: It’s now a luxury for a reporter to write a story about an obscure but important topic. That used to be a job requirement. Now it’s a career risk. Example: let’s say an interesting startup has a new and different idea. Many reporters now won’t touch it because (a) the story won’t generate page views, and (b) few people search on terms germane to that startup. Potential SEO performance is now a key factor in what gets assigned. Page view journalism will make our society poorer because less popular but important topics will be crowded out. I started blogging here in July 2009 and now receive about 12,000 unique visitors a month; this month I might hit a high of 15,000. But only if I write something really sexy.