Soundbite: Only “Low-Value Readers” Won Over With Controversy

by Robert Quigley | 11:43 am, December 10th, 2009

“Your average radical libertarian Ayn Rand-worshipping global warming denialist isn’t exactly a high-value reader — just like your average patchouli-sniffing communistic hippie isn’t, either.”
Bad news, bloggers: according to a Harvard Business Review columnist, controversy is going to be a less and less valuable news product in the years to come.

Umair Haque writes that “One of the new competencies the news media is going to have manage is opinion arbitrage. In an era of media production devolved to the masses, everyone can finally express their opinion. So publishers will have to learn to, to put it crudely, buy opinion low and sell it high.”

What does that mean, exactly? In a nutshell: since everyone can — and does — costlessly express controversial opinions, they lose their value; the pendulum has swung back towards expert opinion and analysis.

As such, Haque is not a fan of the Washington Post for running Sarah Palin’s op-ed column on Climategate, which called for Obama to boycott Copenhagen: “You’ve got to do a whole lot better than publishing fauxp-eds by the opposite of experts.”

(via Harvard Business Review)

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Climategate, Controversy, Fauxp-ed, Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque

4 comments

Nachi says:

December 10, 2009 at 3:21 pm

Pretty accurate. The Randers see her as some kind of status symbol. They can’t possibly understand her. She didn’t even understand herself.

Magister says:

December 10, 2009 at 4:04 pm

If we were to follow this fellow’s logic, then the ad prices on Fox primetime should be less per-viewer than those charged by CNN. This may very well be true, but if anything, Walmart has taught us the economy of scale. I don’t have access to the numbers, but one would assume that Fox is making a higher total gross (primetime) than either of its competitors.

Again, I don’t have the numbers and before I get hit, they were only examples, but…

I also don’t know the dollars banked by his two print examples, but one assumes they appeal to a higher income, more educated reader, who would naturally be worth more per-inch to a certain class of advertisers, but how does their gross compare to National Enquirer?

Magister says:

December 10, 2009 at 4:52 pm

Edit: I that first paragraph (which should probably be two), I meant that “one would assume Fox is charging more per minute (primetime) than either of it’s competitors”. I really didn’t mean to repeat myself, it was an editing error.

(Site Overlords: Any chance we could get Disqus or some other editable, threaded commenting system?)

ImNotBlue says:

December 10, 2009 at 10:35 pm

Nachi says:
December 10, 2009 at 3:21 pm

The Randers see her as some kind of status symbol.

Oh boy! Is this a new made-up word from Nachi? Hooray! Expanding the non-vocabulary is ALWAYS exciting!

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