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

“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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