The executive editor of the New York Times recently set off a storm of criticism in the journalism teacup by downplaying the importance of democracy as a campaign issue and the organization’s responsibility in defending it.
But the admission by Joe Kahn, galling as it might have seemed, has an underlying — and uncomfortable — truth. The Times is a profit-making company, a player in the attention economy. Its mission is to get you to look, and keep looking, whether at its news stories, its recipes, or its games. Everything else, democracy included, is secondary.
Kahn didn’t use those words; he spoke in editorial terms, the language of the newsroom. It was the same vocabulary we employed in my first newsrooms — but the context is utterly different. That difference speaks to the changes in journalism.
In 1979, we made coverage decisions based on traditional criteria: community significance and reader interest. Our only test of the success or wisdom of those decisions, beyond our own assessment, was reader reaction, both written, in the form of letters to the editor, and word of mouth — which occasionally involved someone walking into the newsroom and telling you exactly what they thought.
Unscientific as that feedback on our performance might have been, it was sufficient: Our business model — subscription revenue, display and classified advertising — was stable and lucrative, and 90 percent of the households in our town subscribed to the paper. Our decisions were editorial, and they were made in the newsroom.
That business model has collapsed. Journalists in 2024 use the same vocabulary to describe their work as we did back in 1979. But now each story, each editorial decision, is measured by its success in the attention economy — a business, not an editorial, metric. Will this story succeed by that measure? Can it compete with the Kardashians, Instagram, Netflix, and all the other options available on the same screen?
When every story must be framed for maximum appeal, journalists are left with the tools of the carnival barker, and the threat to the nation’s democracy can become just another sideshow.