Why Controversy Won’t Power Next-Gen News - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
Controversy, in contrast, is worth a great deal only in terms of low-value readers. 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. Both are unlikely to pay for new information, because both think they know it all already. It’s the market in the middle that’s worth the most; they have the highest propensity to consume new stuff: “new“s.
Opinion arbitrage is really the game of setting the terms of a better, more meaningful debate — one that imparts readers with deep, enduring knowledge. That’s what the Financial Times and the Economist, among a select group of others, have excelled at — and it’s what’s powering them to the top of a moribund industry.
All of which makes the Washington Post’s decision to publish an op-ed calling for Barack Obama to boycott Copenhagen because “there’s no such thing as global warming” by (wait for it) Sarah Palin, so disappointing. It’s just 21st century media business as usual — but it’s not fit for 21st century society.
An increasingly desperate Rupert Murdoch can tell you: controversy sells. But it sells for pennies. News publishers should be chasing the big bucks instead. And to earn them, you’ve got to do a whole lot better than publishing fauxp-eds by the opposite of experts.
