The Outstater
Writing for ‘Clicks’
OUR BOOK REVIEWER Mark Franke has written one of his customarily insightful essays, this one on “the end of reading.” I commend it to your attention here.
Franke cites a disturbing statistic: less than 50 percent of adults read a single book in 2022. Although I have no statistics, let me offer a corollary to his proposition. Let’s call it “the end of writing.” I put forward as evidence the work of James Briggs and Michael J. Hicks on the pages of the Indianapolis Star.
Reading either one, it is difficult to imagine that their crass style to meant to impress their peers in journalism (Briggs) or in academia (Hicks). They are smarter than that.
Rather, they are writing for “clicks,” an impersonal, anonymous market-research metric where someone taps or clicks on any part of their digital articles.
Clicks are the coin in which writing, or at least journalistic writing, now trades. Even the once staid Wall Street Journal lists daily its most clicked articles. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a similar list as do most newsrooms, either overtly or tacitly. It is a high-tech version of newsboy hawking.
But clicks, please know, do not measure reader agreement, engagement or even comprehension. Rather, they measure passive viewing, merely the noticing.
And human nature being what it is, we notice most the negatives of life, the worst possible shading of our neighbors’ motivations. Thus, fear-mongering, alarmism, inuendo, gossip and name-calling fill the modern journalist’s tool box.
Tangentially, journalists today cannot imagine plying their trade without the disingenuity of the mock interrogative (are Republicans all racists?”) or the need for the modal verbs should, must, ought.
There is continuous moralizing, admonishing readers on how to think, vote, talk and live. At the same time, there is only the most slavishly emollient packaging for the radical views of the “cool kids,” the ideological Left.
Picture a school being run at the mean girls’ lunch table.
It has not always been so. As a follower of the Lost Generation of writers, I know that Hemingway worried about what Fitzgerald, Pound, Joyce and the Bloomsbury Group thought of his work.
Scaling down from that considerably, we ink-stained wretches of the 1970s newsrooms were only dimly aware of what readers thought of us — the random nasty letter and the annual readership survey commissioned from the publisher’s unemployed nephew. Rather, we were concerned about the respect of those at the proverbial “next desk,” that is, our editors and colleagues.
This respect had to be earned by producing work over time that was accurate, insightful, prescient and perhaps artful when the muse struck.
Briggs and Hicks need not worry about any of that, and they don’t. — tcl
Comments...