Must-read: Shane Ferro: “Thoughts on Business Insider”
Must-Read: Shane Ferro may think that she is not so good at the game of being a twenty-first century journalist working in internet advertising-supported media. But she is very good as a trusted information intermediary and synthesist. In an ideal world, I think she would be one of two-hundred and fifty people I follow who would spend one week a year doing ten posts a day and the rest of the year doing from between five posts a week down to one a month…
: Thoughts on Business Insider: “Tanzina Vega went on a tweetstorm this morning about the state of journalism…
…based on some thoughts about… why so many people have left Business Insider…. I used to work at Business Insider. I quit after 10 months. The first three months were great…. During the second three months the pressure to get more traffic and write a higher number of posts per day ramped up. The last four months, I remember mostly tense meetings about how I wasn’t hitting my goals–five posts per day and one million unique visitors per month. I remember riding the elevator downstairs in the afternoons, hoping that no one would see me crying until I hit the front door and made a left from Fifth Avenue onto 21st Street. I cried a lot while pacing back and forth on 21st street in the summer of 2015…. I never came close to hitting my goals, despite the fact that I became something of a hot take machine….
As Tanzina says in her tweetstorm, it takes quite a bit of thought to come up with a coherent opinion. I don’t have five opinions per day. I have maybe one…. The pro-labor rights econ nerd in me has at times been really angry with BI for how much content they try to squeeze out of writers. But the truth is I knew what I was getting into when I joined…. I wanted to learn how to be Joe Weisenthal. I expected it to be hard, but to ultimately give me another tool in my journalist toolbox…. My problem is my brain doesn’t work the way that it needs to work in order to succeed in that kind of environment. I either spend five seconds on a subject — I read, I think of one thought, I tweet it, and I move on — or I spend somewhere between five hours and five days really thinking through something. I am either intensely focused or completely unfocused. To succeed at BI, you have to be good at the middle ground, where you can read something, spend 30 minutes putting together a summary, maybe add another thought or two, hit publish, and then be immediately ready to start again….
BI is the extreme version of what every news organization now expects of its journalists: fast copy with a broad appeal that’s turned in without much need for editing…. I did not do well at BI…. It ended up being a good thing. It sped up the time it took me to realize that I am bad at the click game, and that means I probably don’t want to be a journalist forever. I spent the last year and a half giving a lot of thought to what’s next (and omfg I am so excited about it!).