The war over the war

The war over the war

I saw this on Rimrats a while ago and have kind of been putting off posting on it.

The first question in this transcript from the Washington Post was: How is it that eight U.S. soldiers killed in one day in Iraq doesn't warrant front-page treatment in The Washington Post? Is the paper that out of touch with how much we, as Americans, care about our troops?

It's interesting how the war has slowly gone from front page material to small stories buried in the paper. If a bomb blows up in Baghdad, how many people does it have to kill to warrant a news story? How many deaths does it take to get on the front page? Do we need to wait until it's a nice round number like 4,000 before we make it a front page centerpiece?

I'm not sure that there is a right answer to any of those questions, but I do think newspapers are too caught up in what people want to know instead of what people should know. Working at Azcentral, everything is about clicks. It's the barometer that we use to determine success. If a certain number of clicks is reached in a given month, we get a pat on the back. If the clicks fall short of the benchmark, we're told there's room for improvement. This of course results in so much fluff being published on the site. Spring break coverage was unbelievable. There were live bloggers, a bunch of photographers, a series of slide shows with 40+ photos in each of them, and many video clips that are still being rotated around the site - because they get clicks.

Meanwhile there's still a war going on in Iraq, and you may be able to find a recent headline on it every now and then if you search the archives. Now I realize a news organization needs eyeballs to lure advertisers and stay in business. But it also has to find a balance between reporting need-to-know information and flashy stuff that is going to catch people's eye. I think at some point Azcentral needs to stop worrying about clicks and start worrying about whether it really wants college girls in bikinis on its homepage for a week.