When I began in this business nearly four decades ago, one could agonize over every word choice, triple-check every fact and still have to worry about some 12-year-old slacker throwing your day’s work into the bushes on his morning route.
Now it’s different. Now I get an email each morning from one of the bosses showing me how my column fared in the Daily PG Digital Metrics. Or another boss might send one explaining which reporter had broken Chartbeat with story hits.
Chartbeat is a website displayed on TV screens throughout the newsroom, showing how many people are reading a given story at that moment. Beating it means sending it higher than it can count, and that takes more hits than you’d need to crack open a steel piñata. It’s particularly impressive if your story can beat Chartbeat without using the word “Steelers.”
I was at my desk the other day navigating this brave new world when I found buried in my spam filter a press release saying a human’s attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s. Eight seconds is about where we’re at these days.
Hey, where’d everybody go?
If there are any highly evolved folks still with me, I then called the publicist for Gfycat.com, a site where people can generate those ultra-short videos called GIFs. (Gfycat is pronounced “Jiffy Cat,” by the way. You’d think with all that money in the Silicon Valley, they could buy more vowels.)
Soon enough, I was on the phone with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Richard Rabbat, and asking whether those of us who write 750-word columns are headed for the dustbin of history. These once were considered short essays, but they must seem as daunting as “War and Peace” to those living on goldfish time.
“I hope not,” Mr. Rabbat said of my fear. “I’m an avid newsreader. I actually think reading is still going to continue to be a thriving activity.”
He then gave me plenty of reasons to believe those hopes dubious. People are pulling their phones from their pockets 85 times a day, he said. That’s mostly not to talk, but to stare. And it’s human nature to treat anything moving as important.
“We’re at the beginning of a journey in terms of how we’re looking at short-form content. We’re looking at other ways of presenting information that’s interesting or playful or delightful.”
Thus he works day and night to ensure that the person with a couple of minutes to kill waiting in the Starbucks line won’t find those 120 seconds too tedious. If they develop a sore neck looking down all the time — “text neck’’ is a trendy malady — there are orthopedists who can help.
I asked Mr. Rabbat if he ever got tired of all the rankings. Venture capitalists will either bet millions on his company or keep it in their vaults depending on how many people visit his site.
“At the end of the day, I’m a product guy,” he said. “If I’m building something people use and like a lot, if the user is excited, then everything else falls into place. That’s how I think of it.”
Like a pop singer seeking to top the charts, he has to focus on the song and not the sales. At 45, he’s been at this a long time, having convinced his parents to buy him a computer when he was 11. That turned into one lucky break for a boy growing up in war-torn Beirut, Lebanon.
But whither the children such as I, who took up notebooks and pens at that age?
“When you’re consuming content,” he said, “you want to get a breadth of information. But the one piece of information that you really care about you want to research more. You can insert GIFs into the story and the GIFs will highlight a very important part of what the story is about, immediately grab people’s attention, and they’ll read the 1,200-word document [that’s attached].”
His people sent me a couple GIFs as illustration. They’re published with this column online. I guess I’ll know Monday if they help me scale Mt. Chartbeat.
As for my print readers, they shall never be forgotten. To take just one example, I try to be out the door each day by 6:30 a.m. so I can get my neighbor’s newspaper through her rowhouse mail slot before it’s stolen.
The stoops are right on the sidewalk in my neighborhood, you see, and some still prefer to get their Steelers fix the old-fashioned way.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: August 27, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
