Media Maneuvers: Play for pay

Not surprisingly, Quittner's plan earned him some kudos in the blogosphere, where Matthew Ingram, for one, a technology writer for Toronto's Globe and Mail, noted that newspapers already do, to some extent, hire, fire and pay their reporters by how well they are read. "Should writers and reporters be motivated solely by a desire for filthy lucre?" he asks. "Obviously not. But it is already part of the equation. Josh is just proposing that we make it a little more obvious."

To be sure, Ingram has a point. But we would argue that the issues raised by Quittner's plan are much more complicated than Ingram lets on. By encouraging his newly hatched bloggers to write about personal interests and then paying them for traffic, isn't Quittner turning this project into a personal popularity contest? What if, say, somebody on staff is a dominatrix in her spare time and blogs about that? Isn't she bound to get more traffic than somebody who collects commemorative spoons for a hobby and waxes poetic on that? And how would the dominatrix's traffic (or Copeland's surfer traffic, for that matter) benefit Business 2.0, which bills itself as "the playbook for a new generation of leaders"? How would it work with the Business 2.0 brand and how would it be monetized?

Dan Shanoff, a columnist for ESPN, did a pretty good job dissecting — and panning — Quittner's plan on The Huffington Post's Eat The Press site. "It used to be that writers-turned-bloggers became 'hit ho's' obsessed with traffic numbers, because who doesn't want to be read by as many people as possible?" Shanoff writes. "But, now, with the added incentive of cash — based entirely on traffic performance, as opposed to critical approval — it's worth questioning what the effects on the journalism will be."

Among the ill ones, he argues, is that journalists will tailor their coverage to topics that generate the most traffic rather than those whose audience might be a bit more specialized — read small. "[W]ho wants to bet that this skews titles away from 'The Application of Actuarial Science In Interstate Commerce' and toward 'The Sex Industry: Hookers, Porn and The Bottom Line'?" Shanoff asks. In Media Maneuvers terms, it might mean abandoning our nice little niche of commenting on deal and finance coverage in favor of Romenesko-ready rants on big media names like Kurt Andersen and Michael Wolff, The Deal's core audience and mission be damned.

None of this is that far-fetched. In fact, we've already seen a bevy of business Web sites wander off their parents' farms in search of new eyeballs. Forbes.com, for example, scored a truckload of links to mass-market Web sites in August by posting a provocative article urging men to steer clear of marrying career women or risk living in a dirty house. Way to go, Capitalist Tool! And BusinessWeek Online, the new home of former Forbes.com "lifestyle editor" Charles Dubow, is running "slideshows" on such un-businesslike topics as the "Coolest Cop Cars," "Super Bathrooms," and our personal favorite, "Super Doghouses." "From the canine avant-garde to the miniature mutt mansion, this BusinessWeek.com slideshow gives dogs and owners alike something to drool over," it coos.

But are those droolers really BusinessWeek readers? Will they return to the Web site day after day and read its other, more business-y fare? Or are they just passing through on their way to DogChannel.com? Perhaps only time will tell if all eyeballs are good ones and if splashy, less-specialized Web content, whether via blogs, slide shows or whatever, can attract the kind of high-powered, high-income readers magazines such as BusinessWeek and Business 2.0 purport to deliver to advertisers. In his Huff Po piece, Shanoff laments that Business 2.0's plan will divert its journalists' attention "from the quality of their writing to the quality of their traffic." But we'd argue that the quality of the traffic has yet to be taken into account. Right now, it's all about the quantity.—Yvette Kantrow