Wolff: The publishing business is a business

Simon & Schuster is publishing a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News right-wing provocateur, and for that has been roundly cursed by liberals, and accordingly mounted a free speech defense.

Buzzfeed published the dossier of unverified charges against soon-to-be President Trump and was roundly attacked by Trump partisans, and, as well left many journalists, to say the least, uncomfortable. The site took to the talk shows to makes its case for open information.

In a not unrelated development, Facebook, widely criticized for its willing, if unwitting, distribution of fake news, has announced new, if not particularly convincing, measures to develop ways to qualify its content.

The same question is at the heart of each of these media tempests: how much is a publisher responsible for what it publishes?

The traditional view, at least since publishing, in the late Victorian age, became a money-making and therefore respectable industry, is that if you publish it, you own it. You were not only legally responsible for it, but it firmly attached to your reputation. This led to protocols about editing, fact checking, and the development of a long cannon of journalism standards and ethics. It also led to the idea of publishing brands. What you published defined you in the community and in the marketplace.

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The Yiannopoulos book is a particularly good example of the breakdown of this view. Book imprints were once the staunchest cultural gatekeepers, with issues of taste and sales closely twinned, and with the decision to publish resting, often, on a small group of editors, or even on a single shoulder. You knew who was responsible. But then a massive consolidation of the business occurred, mixing and mashing brands, and, with new financial dictates, in essence, commoditizing books.

Any book that makes financial sense to publish, no matter its nature, will, practically speaking, be published by any publisher. Beyond a book’s financial bona fides, there is no real vetting, or editing, or concerns about taste. Most of the book industry is now a business focused on creating products—often novelty products connected to a celebrity—for specific market segments. A new crop of conservative publishers were suddenly making lots of money publishing conservative books. Hence, every major publisher hurried to established its own conservative imprint — the Yiannopoulos book is published by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions—often run by liberals. In a sense, this is an example of the media overcoming its bias. In another sense, it’s purely cynical: we believe none of this, but the money’s good.

Buzzfeed when it launched in 2006, was an effort to use new technology to help harness certain digital behaviors and amass large amounts of traffic, algorithms combined with cat videos. In a positioning slight of hand, it added a news organization to burnish its brand and distinguish it from the lower-end content producers starting to fall out of favor with social media distributors, notably Facebook. But Buzzfeed News, while a change in brand, was not a change in Buzzfeed’s business model: mass, undifferentiated, traffic.

Buzzfeed’s editor, Ben Smith, made a journalism argument for publishing the raw Trump dossier (CNN published a report on the dossier, but not the actual material). Information can’t be controlled, he argued, therefore it is the responsibility of the media to contextualize it. But this was really a market argument: Buzzfeed, competing in a world where everything would be published anyway, only realized an advantage if it published the inevitable first.

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There are many examples of this as a historic publishing approach—pictures of Elvis in his coffin or Jackie in the nude come to mind. But the model was circumscribed by brand. What you published defined you and your value—if you published tabloid stuff you were a tabloid, with clear market implications, not least of all among advertisers. Buzzfeed is in a more complex position: it must, to some extent, defend its publishing status for the sake of its blue chip investors, but at the same time its value is wholly related to its traffic—its advertisers (many who, buying traffic through automated systems, don’t know they are on Buzzfeed) care only about and pay only according to the traffic it delivers. Hence, Ben Smith became the tortured face of having to justify his immense traffic windfall.

Maybe it is good that the publishing world still believes that there is a need for some kind of rationalization about what it publishes. Facebook certainly seems to think it has to come up with some system or procedure or technology or method by which it can more artfully justify a model in which it takes no real responsibility for its content.

Certainly, there are countervailing and cautionary winds out there. Trump, for better or worse, is suggesting that the media ought to be more accountable. The shuttering of Gawker, the gossip site, following its loss of a privacy suit, directly challenges the digital conceit that all hurdles to publishing have flattened. This election year has roundly been a debate about accuracy and meaning—and responsibility.

And yet, business is business.

If publishing no longer works as a set of brands, as an act of identity, as a pursuit of an idea, as standing for something but is only about commodity, then the deluge has just begun. Then there is no publishing business.