Performance-pay and competition

This is an interesting post by Adam Tinworth, head of blogging for RBI, discussing how professional journalists tend to differ from bloggers when it comes to being judged by metrics. Professional journalists are often on salary -- without any pay being directly correlated to the traffic their articles generate -- or paid by the word. Contrast this to bloggers who are increasingly being paid, in essence, by the advertising that results on their site -- directly correlated to traffic. Should journalists and bloggers be "paid for performance"? I agree with Adam's final point here:

I exist in an odd place, suspended between the world of bloggers, who live and die by their metrics, and journalists, who seem to view them as some evil irrelevance imposed on them by greedy publishers. In all honesty, I find myself having more sympathy with the bloggers - who view metrics as a clear indication of what their readers like - than the journalists. All too often conversations between journalists about the nature of their trade exclude serving the readers as part of it. And that's just plain worrying.

I think Adam's point about journalists and how much they care about their readers is a good one. It's one of the things often missed in the generalized disdain that professional media often have for the blogosphere: blogs live or die by their readers. In the end, professional media does too, of course, but this cycle is long and indirect.

Cokie Roberts, who I've enjoyed watching for many years on ABC's This Week, gallantly holds up the fuddy-duddy party line by lamenting the general "decline in excellence" in this interview with CNET.


Her point is simple: journalists are trained, bloggers are not, but, alas, no one seems to care anymore -- all that's been "thrown out the window." Competition hasn't elevated journalism, it's brought it down into the muck. But I think Mrs. Roberts's disdain -- after this critique of bloggers on CNet she claimed yesterday on The Week "I don't even read the blogosphere" -- is misplaced. Competition for news is not something new, the CNN cycle has been a reality for decades, and even Cokie said she felt the cable news was worse than blogs.

But more to the point, while competition can sometimes be ugly to watch, the process can yield much better results in the end than the stilted oligarchies that Mrs. Roberts has so long associated herself with. Airplanes were thought to be reckless and impractical, compared to the airships of old. And, indeed, they were -- which is why thousands died inventing them and government programs invested instead in the airships that were sure to be the air equivalent of the great ships of ocean transport. However it wasn't *despite* the reckless hot shots who competed and rapidly iterated their inventions, but *because* of those adventurers that the airplane now dominates the skies.

Competition doesn't work because every competitor is noble and true -- and any average competitor may be decried as inferior to the expert -- but rather it is a discovery process. And the critique of the mediocre competitor is sport for the lazy. Look no further than the broadcast in which Cokie rolled her eyes at the blogosphere -- George Stephanopoulos quotes none other than Talking Points Memo, a fantastic site that has grown up and thrived because of the competition of the blogosphere. I think that while some may cringe at the competitors, if not the competition, and deplore the abyss into which they believe bloggers are leading us into, we'll in fact find that the winners of this competition will elevate us far above where we were when the competition started.

And that competition will help lift, even as it bruises, all sides -- which brings me back to Adam's post. I think this is a healthy dialectic. I do think there is a difference, however, in using metrics to measure the success of a professional journalist, writing as part of a larger entity, than measuring a blogger, writing on behalf of his or her own brand. For the same reason that I think CPA advertising will come under some scrutiny, metrics for bloggers don't tell the whole story. In advertising, if you only pay for the final click or the action, you are not properly valuing all the impressions that led up to that final click or action. In media, the view of an article is the end result a huge effort, usually by many people, and often through many years, that can't be tied to any single individual. What led me to click on that NYT article: the NYT brand, the subject matter, the title, the writer, the editor, the photograph, the link from within the site, the link from a blog, the Google search, etc, etc?

I don't think the answer of how to properly measure and compensate bloggers and journalists alike is an easy one. But I think competition will help us find the answer.