This is not good news for local journalism:
“The owner of The Sacramento Bee is trying to tie journalists’ pay to the number of clicks their stories get.”
We get that McClatchy, parent of the Bee, is in financial trouble. We get that local news could sometimes use some sexing up.
But we’ve also got to wonder who’s going to churn out well-researched stories on the full bevy of legislative issues put on the table every year in California? Because let’s be honest: Payday lender regulation, the intricacies of vapor bans, and minutiae about whether the Attorney General’s office is sufficiently well-funded aren’t going to get clicks the same as London Breed firing off missives about the renaming of public schools – and yet several of these things are massively more important that Breed trying to goad teachers back into the classroom by invoking the “cancellation” of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.
Yet one will get clicks. The others, not so much.
Subscribe to your local newspaper people, and your state’s capitol newspaper, too. It’s the only way to prevent them from turning into some moderately more socially acceptable version of the Drudge Report.