Ryan Holiday’s book Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, offers a penetrating look behind the incentives of media. Holiday is a practitioner of the dark arts of media manipulation.
For me the most interesting part of the book was the history of the press, which begins with the Party Press, moves on to the infamous Yellow Press and ends with the Modern Press (aka Subscription Press).
The One-Off Problem shaped more than just the design and layout of the newspaper. When news is sold on a one-off basis, publishers can’t sit back and let the news come to them. There isn’t enough of it, and what comes naturally isn’t exciting enough. So they must create the news that will sell their papers. When reporters were sent out to cover spectacles and events, they knew that their job was to cover the news when it was there and to make it up when it was not.
Just take a look at Gawker and The Huffington Post. It’s the modern version of the One-Off problem. Instead of trying to sell you a copy of the newspaper by shouting on the street corner, today’s media want page views. In yellow journalism, headlines and promotions were more important than content.