It's satirical, but the truth part of it hurts.
Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning
http://www.theonion.com/articles/let-me-explain-why-miley-cyrus-vma-performance-was,33632/?ref=auto"Over the years, CNN.com has become a news website that many people turn to for top-notch reporting. Every day it is visited by millions of people, all of whom rely on “The Worldwide Leader in News”—that’s our slogan—for the most crucial, up-to-date information on current events. So, you may ask, why was this morning’s top story, a spot usually given to the most important foreign or domestic news of the day, headlined “Miley Cyrus Did What???” and accompanied by the subhead “Twerks, stuns at VMAs”?
It’s a good question. And the answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue."
Why the Onion is Wrong About CNN and Miley Cyrus
Pretty good response to the The Onion close to home satire. Gives 3 options for news organizations:
1) You can remain in denial that quality alone will prevail despite all evidence of the contrary.
2) You can do whatever it takes to drive traffic and lose any sense of distinct brand identity.
3) You can coordinate a balanced attack between the quality that supports the brand but not traffic with more broadly appealing content that does more for traffic than it does the brand.
http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/why-the-onion-is-wrong-about-cnn-and-miley-cyrus-1200589821/
I definitely think that this illustrates a conflict between the "news" function of an organization and the "business" function of an organization. The realities of the economy and the whole "doing more with less" notion can squeeze the quality out of reporting and potentially force journalists to sacrifice the typical norms and ethics of the job to satisfy audiences and the pockets of the company.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Nicholas. We're constantly being taught to avoid reporting sensationalistic news and to focus on hard-hitting topics that really impact our lives. But the fact of the matter is that the obscure and interesting topics will garner more views, clicks, listeners, etc. News about celebrities and their actions should typically stay within the realm of entertainment news but I think as long as a news organization can angle a story in a way to make it more "newsy" then it shouldn't really be a problem.
ReplyDeleteI think that CNN's headline story of Miley Cyrus at the VMA's is a very controversial topic, as Nicholas and Judy have discussed. In this day and age, sensational news is very popular and attracts a large audience. While CNN's headline attracted many viewers and, therefore, made more profit, I agree with Nicolas that reporters have to remember the standards of their organization. If CNN were continue to practice this behavior of dealing out celebrity gossip, they would lose many of their other customers and lose credibility. In an industry where anyone can publish on the web, I believe that credibility is the most important asset and should not be compromised.
ReplyDeletePost's like these are what the Onion does best - posts that put into words what everybody has been thinking. Other examples of this include a June 18 post titled "Syrian Rebels, Government Think It's About Time to Call Syria a Day" and a July 17 post titled "Man Who Couldn't Defeat George W. Bush Attempting to Resolve Israel-Palestine Conflict." All of these posts are satirical, but are approached from a very honest place. This post is the same - people generally acknowledge that the Miley Cyrus story is not important, but it is relevant and gives CNN the chance to get a high number of clicks.The Onion's post might be satire, but it hits the nail on the head in explaining why CNN chose to feature the story so prominently.
ReplyDeleteSadly, this qualifies as news, and it satisfies CNN's (and other's) neverending need for pageviews. The highest volume of Internet useage comes from teenagers and early twentysomethings, the same group most interested in Miley's antics. Their expansive interest makes the event news, and makes CNN obligated to cover it. Should it have been the top story? Probably not, given that day was the 50th anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech and the conflict in Syria was at its peak. But young Americans have a short attention span for hard news, and an unending thirst for pop culture. Those things combine to, unfortunately, make twerking front page news.
ReplyDeleteFor starters, I would not have expected Cyrus to be a top story on CNN's site. I would however expect her twerking to be a top story on E! News' site. I am not going to say that it is sad and depressing that America's youth is more concerned with what Cyrus and Thicke do on stage at the VMA's and that CNN had to put it on their website to obtain higher traffic. I believe that what happened at the VMA's is news; it may not be new and be interesting to everyone, but it was to me (and the 99.9% of you who watched video on YouTube afterward).
ReplyDeleteI don't think the discussion is whether twerking is news, but rather what was it doing on CNN? For that my answer is: it should not have been. At least not a top story. Maybe, and that's a very small maybe, one could argue the value it gave to CNN's traffic on the site, but not a strong enough argument to justify the story itself.
CNN should stick to what it covers best and leave the rest to E! News.
The articles do a good job of setting up the conflict between having meaningful hard news and sustaining the business model of the media. While covering Cyrus could draw a lot of traffic it does not help the reputation of CNN. Unfortunately with page views being so important to bringing in advertising revenue traditional news outlets may be encouraged to cover similar events in the future. But with the near unlimited space that is available to an online news organization, putting the VMA story on the site does not prevent other stories from being reported as well. It may get more attention and be more prominently placed, but it shouldn’t prevent other stories from being available on the site. As long as outlets like CNN.com continue to have hard news the occasional focus on pop culture won’t destroy them entirely. If the VMA story drew people to more serious news stories that were on CNN, it may have done some good besides just generating better page view stats.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Max that though the Miley Cyrus VMA story may appear to hurt CNN's reputation, it doesn't mean that there aren't stories the reflect great hard news reporting on the page as well. It's not as if the Cyrus piece would replace all other hard news, it just gives viewers more options. I may be biased, because I would love to be able to cover entertainment, and the VMA's most certainly fall under entertainment, but I believe that it isn't terrible for CNN, though under the reputation of a hard news source, to branch out and cover other things. If that helps increase their site traffic, and in turn helps gain them advertising revenue, so be it.
ReplyDelete