Paying Journalists on Commission
For the past few years, journalists from traditional media have been shocked and horrified at every new model (or suggestion of a model) that would reward content creators based on pageviews or ratings or copies sold. The outrage! A vulgar popularity contest!
Seth Godin joined the fray this week by suggesting that everyone — journalists included — should be compensated on a commission basis, like salespeople. Godin’s readers know that he tends to exaggerate his points for effect, and I’m sure this week’s post is no exception. But the point (in some less hyperbolic iteration) is a very good one. If you look at pageviews or ratings or copies sold as measures of consumer satisfaction, rather than vulgar popularity contests, Godin’s suggestion makes sense, and isn’t actually that new. Doing a good job matters. Executives at media companies — the publishers, the presidents, the editors in chief, the directors of circulation — have always been evaluated based on that kind of “consumer satisfaction.” As readers flock to competitive publications, top brass at the shrinking-popularity publication lose their jobs. That’s why serious magazines often opt for sensational cover designs.
Raw popularity, though, isn’t the best way to measure quality. Us Weekly will always be more popular than the New York Review of Books. But popularity among your universe of prospective readers — the wide net of people who like celebrities, or the narrow net of people who like literary books — is a fair measure of the quality of your organization’s work.
The tricky part is isolating the quality of one individual’s work from the organization as a whole. A great journalist teamed up with a lousy circulation person isn’t likely to hit his or her readership goals, just like a great salesperson who is teamed up with an incompetent ad operations person isn’t likely to collect his or her full commission, no matter how good s/he is at selling.
I love the commission model; it creates urgency and accountability — both of which are far more productive than whining about bloggers and the proliferation of free news on the internet. (Or newspaper bailouts, for crying out loud.) But let’s be sure any commission model for journalists is sophisticated enough to reward (or penalize) the results that journalists have control over.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Brett . Brett said: journalists on commission? I think so. But viewers/pageviews alone oversimplifies it. New post: http://bit.ly/P9t56 (via @chasnote) [...]
a question without an answer is a paradox or a rhetorical question, so thats just not funny…..but yea
Chas I like the idea of commission, it’s a twist on ‘pay per post’ that may make more sense. Thanks for putting it in context.
Ellin–
Thanks for the comment. “Pay per post” is a practice (one that I despise) that generally refers to advertisers paying writers to write about their products, and most journalists avoid those arrangements because of a justified fear that it will compromise their credibility with readers. I’m suggesting that journalists’ pay should be linked to satisfying readers, not advertisers.
I’m also trying to acknowledge that journalists covering local school boards have a smaller theoretical audience (”universe,” as my ad agency friends would say) than journalists covering the love-lives of young celebrities. If there were a way to determine the size of the universe for each journalist’s beat — say 20,000 for the school board reporter, and 1,000,000,000 for the celebrity paparazzi — then (and only then!) might we have the necessary data to measure “journalistic performance” in way similar to how we measure “sales performance.”
That leaves out at least one other factor. Are there important stories that are successful, even if they don’t reach a high percentage of their intended “universe”? Take Watergate. The universe of people who should care about a US President breaking the law in order to subvert American democracy? Let’s say around 3 billion people at the time. If the story never made it to the front page of the Post, never made to the front page of every newspaper in the world, never got Nixon to resign, and reached only 20,000 wonks inside the beltway, would the story have been as “successful”?
There may be a place for this but only if you can truly identify who is a loyal reader rather than the occasional or one-time reader. Lots of stories can drive one-time traffic surges from sites like…. DIGG. The person who can generate a story like this fare pretty well. But 1x visitors do not make a community. As a publisher, I would want to reward the content creators who can consistently bring visitors back to my brand.
I do like the notion of everyone getting a portion of their compensation based on the health of the company. Not 5% but 25% or more. All too often, content creators have very little upside/downside in their comp plans. In a manner of speaking that could be thought of as commission. This aligns the content organization with the product and sales efforts while still keeping it separate (depending on the org the separation could play out differently.) This model could also help reduce expenses when a company wasn’t doing well. While never a great thing, this could be much better than having to lay of 25% of the editorial force.
It is a hard problem and one that becomes more challenging as Church/State lines are revisited/reinterpreted.
Chas, you ignorant … oh, never mind. You’re right that paying journalists on commission would be a more sensible economic model. But there are elements of journalism that go beyond P&L statements.
Watergate? What if a night cops reporter for The Washington Post on June 17, 1972, had opted to cover a raid at a sex club (more pageviews!) instead of checking out a routine-sounding office break-in? Or, more to the point, don’t ask whether that story was successful in attracting audience. Ask whether you wanted a crook in your White House, and whether it was the job of journalism to dig, dig, and dig some more to find the truth.
If you boil journalism down to dollars, why is The New York Times spending a fortune every year, while its journalists and support people risk their lives, to cover Iraq? The ROI on that is terrible. But it’s really, really, really important, and no, it wouldn’t work to pull out the pros and rely on tweets to tell the story.
Lots of journalism is already based on audience response. Sections of the paper that can’t draw significant advertising are shrinking fast. Social news (”Mrs. Finklewood had the Bludersons over for chicken dinner”) disappeared from most newspapers years ago. A separate tech section came and went in the Times. Travel sections thrive, not so much because it’s the most compelling journalism, but because there’s a healthy mix of reader and advertiser interest. And lots of blogs pay by the pageview.
Just don’t let ROI wipe out the part of our democracy that keeps it honest.
Neil–
Thank you. It’s obvious which of us has spent a career managing sellers and marketers, and which has spent a career managing journalists and editors when he’s not teaching j-school students!
More evidence to your point: Local TV news in the 1990s. As actual violent crime rates went down, airtime spent covering violent crime went up to chase ratings. And who knows if we missed another Watergate in the past 15 years while we gave cable news great ratings for a story in which a President cheated on his wife (without laying a finger on democracy in the process)?
Is there a case to be made that “investigative news” should be pulled out of the media business altogether? Actually make it the Forth Estate of government, like we learned in school, and fund it like we fund Congress, the Supreme Court and NPR? Let smarter, more nuanced managers (like you) point the *investigative* journalists at the work of keeping democracy honest. As for the content creators on the tech, travel, sports, auto, lifestyle and celebrities beats, send em my way — I’ll get them on a new comp plan!
Can journalism (or content creation generally) be split in two like that?
Pete–
That’s a great point: Simple measurement tools (like pageviews or TV ratings) can be gamed too easily. You want more free search traffic? Hire a shady SEO firm to inflate your PageRank. Want better ratings for your network? Invest a big chunk of your programming and promotions budget into a blow-out sweeps week.
Real value, for the media property and for the advertisers, is created by the loyalists — the repeat visitors, the subscribers, the viewers who can’t miss an episode.
Damn, this hypothetical commission plan for journalists is getting complex!