Sports writing days unearthed an ugly digital media truth

The only people in digital media who are your friends are those with enough guts to share what these people are really up to.

As cynical as I sound toward my old workplace, I needed to spend two years there if I wanted to maximize my future output. Why? Because working as a full-time employee in corporate America at a borderline mainstream media outlet and global media company confirmed a lot.

One, I learned the extent of how much psychology goes into headlines. You know those tickers at the bottom of your screen on Fox News, MSNBC, or whatever your chosen news network is?

Let me tell you a secret that isn’t really a secret these days: They exist to bring about emotion in you. To profit from that emotion (usually outrage) and to keep your eyes glued to the TV, your tablet, laptop, or phone instead of what’s in front of you.

And they’re not shy about it. My old senior director literally repeated themselves multiple times a week that “we want to keep them on our sites and keep them clicking ads.”

Once I realized emotion drives clicks, and clicks feed surveillance, it confirmed to me that media is less storytelling and more behavior shaping.

I also learned how short people’s attention spans were

Why don’t you take a guess of what constituted a good scroll rate? Anything over 25 percent. Over 30 percent? Then you just wrote a damn good article. Well done, TC, you kept fans on our sites from that article about something that’ll be completely irrelevant in about 24 hours! Go do it again!

And why not further guess what a good average duration looked like? About 20 seconds.

If in the rare event a piece of mine hit one minute, it was golden. Usually longform pieces. But hey, they wanted at least 100 articles a month from me. So most of my content, and that of others, was roughly 500 to 700 words.

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