Breaking up with outrage porn

My journey.

On Tuesday morning, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds said this of classified documents found in the bathroom at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home:

"There are 33 bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago. So don't act like it's just in some random bathroom that the guests can go into. That's not true."

And I immediately started writing up a post on it. After all, Donalds’ comments are ridiculous on their face. Because Trump lives in a big home with lots of bathrooms it’s somehow ok that he kept classified documents stored in them? Like, it makes no sense!

It is, in a word, outrageous.

It’s also not worth an entire post on this site. Not from me. Not anymore.

One of the things I have been thinking a lot about over the past 6 months is how I choose what to write about and, as importantly, how I choose what NOT to write about.

While I was at CNN — and particularly during the pandemic — I got into a bad habit: I set myself a goal of writing four distinct items a day. No one told me to do it — and, in fact, several editors suggested that I cut back some.

I didn’t listen. The reason? I was addicted to the traffic. The more I wrote, the more traffic it did. The more important I thought I was to the organization. ¹

Which brings me to what I call “outrage porn” — the stuff that crops up every news cycle when a politician says or does something stupid.

Outrage porn is a sure-fire traffic winner. Literally everyone clicks on a piece that says “You’ll never believe what this Republican Member of Congress said.” Right?

It is designed to outrage — and to share. The goal is that a person not only reads it but then sends it to 5 friends telling them they have to read it too. And then they send it to 5 friends and so on and so forth.

I became an expert in outrage porn over my years at the Washington Post and CNN. Whenever Marjorie Taylor Greene said or tweeted something, I wrote it. Whenever Ron Johnson raised questions about Covid-19 and vaccines, I wrote about it. It was damn near Pavlovian.

And, invariably, those pieces performed very well — in terms of traffic. But I am not sure that they did anything to really inform and educate people. I wasn’t saying anything bigger about politics or culture; I was just saying “Look at this dumb thing a politician said.”

A big part of the problem — as I think back on it now — was that I was effectively using Twitter as an assignment editor. On Twitter, outrage is the default emotion. What pops to the top of the algorithm is the stuff people are pissed off about.

On Tuesday morning alone, I saw the Donalds’ quote from no fewer than 5 different journalists — everyone sharing it in our unique echo chamber.

That amount of sharing made it SEEM like a VERY big deal. Everyone is talking about this!! And, I knew — because I have been doing this for a long time now — that had I written a whole piece about Donalds, it would have succeeded on one level (eyeballs).

(Be honest: If I had written a whole post about Donalds’ comments, you would have probably have read it. And you might have shared it too!)

The problem? I didn’t have anything to say beyond “Look at this dumb quote!” Sure, I could make the case that Donalds is part of the broader attempt within the Republican party to cover for Trump. But, you already know that — and I have already written it.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the only real reason — or at least the main reason — I was going to write about Donalds was for likes and shares. So, I decided not to do it — or at least write about it in a very different way.

I think it’s important to note here that someone else may well see that Donalds quote and write something elegant and insightful about it. That’s the great thing about writing — you have a lot of smart people thinking hard about stuff.

My point is that I didn’t have anything profound to say about it. And the more I thought about my motivations for writing about it, the more I became convinced I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I needed to think harder about what I was doing rather than just write write write.

I also want to point out that some of my favorite writers — Dave Weigel at Semafor, Philip Bump at the Washington Post — write (or have written) consistently off of the zeitgeist of a given day in politics. There’s absolutely nothing inherently wrong with a) doing that or b) writing a lot.

For me, it’s the kind of stuff I was writing. I was too willing to put traffic over news worthiness — or if I had something actually interesting to say about a topic. Which is not to throw the baby out with bathwater; I think a lot of the work I did for CNN was good!

Writing for Substack has helped changed my perspective. I have a longer term view rather than a short term one. I am writing with the idea of building a loyal community of subscribers who, hopefully, decide to pay for the journalism I am doing.

It’s the difference between a quick hit of traffic adrenaline and a longer term plan to build up a certain set of muscles.

NONE of this is to say that I am going to be writing less — I think my rhythm is 2 and maybe 3 posts a day — or that I won’t be writing from things in the news. I will!

The key for me now is to make sure I have something to say beyond “This is outrageous!!!!” Twitter exists for just that reason. I am going to use Substack to say something (hopefully) more profound.

1. This is not to say that traffic doesn’t matter to an individual or a newsroom. It, of course, does. It’s simply to suggest that there are — and need to be — other metrics for defining success.