click_bait unhinged '...social media amplify the financial incentive to join the herd. even the littlest magazine has the possibility of achieving vitality, of attracting millions of readers...the results are highly derivative. as in hollywood, time and money get poured into a formulaic product, a cautious imitation of past successes. joshua topology, a founder of vox media and the verge, bemoaned this creeping homogenization: 'everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs.' the problem isn't just the medias dependence on silicon valley companies. it's the dependence on silicon valley values. just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. and this data has come to corrupt journalism. reporters and their bosses can assert otherwise. they can pretend to rise above the information, to selectively ignore the numbers and continue the relentless pursuit of higher truths and nobler interests. but data is a pandora's box. once journalists come to know what works, which stories yield traffic, they will pursue what works. this is the definition of pandering and it has horrific consequences. donald trump is the culmination of the era. he understood how, more than at any moment in recent history, media need to give the public what it wants, a circus that exploits subconscious tendencies and biases...once trump became a plausible candidate, the media had no choice but to cover him. but media had carried him to that point. stories about trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the gods of data and benefited the bottom line. trump began as cecil the lion, and then ended up president of the united states.' -franklin foer 171227 what's it to you? who go blather from