West is from Huntsville, Ala. and is set to graduate this May with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history. Since 2018, West has worked at The Auburn Plainsman, the school’s student-run newspaper, where he currently serves as editor-in-chief.
It is undeniable that newsroom revenue is becoming more and more dependent on website and social media clicks. This also means that it has become easier to track exactly how well an individual article does in relation to the rest of the organization’s content. While the combination of these two phenomena might encourage some organizations to incentivize their writers by directly linking their pay to the number of clicks their articles get, I think this would instead incentivize bad journalistic processes which would further plunge this industry into corporatization and sensationalism.
This would be especially true at a local level—a place where journalism has already faltered and fallen victim to the economic ravages of the internet. If you were to take a hypothetical reporter whose pay was reliant on the number of clicks her stories brought in and ask her to either cover a city council meeting or a sporting event, she would obviously choose to cover the sporting event. Afterall, that story will get a lot more attention than one about city bureaucracy.
The problem is that we need people to cover city council meetings. So much governing is done at a local to state level, and our job as journalists is to ensure that the public has a chance to know about what is going on in their communities.
It’s inevitable that newsrooms’ revenue will—at least for the foreseeable future— heavily rely on clicks. But even when revenue was based on advertising, journalists’ salaries weren’t tied to the number of ads the paper sold.
When journalists have to make editorial decisions based on their own salary, other things start to fall through the cracks. Now isn’t the time to let that happen.
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