Can listicles fund the Baghdad bureau?

• Author: Waldman, Steve
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

How BuzzFeed and HuffPo manage to do real journalism. For now.

The Internet has harmed journalism in part by obliterating our self-delusions. In the past, when media companies funded labor-intensive journalism--foreign coverage, investigative projects, beat reporters who spend days tracking down leads--we believed this reportage was very valuable, even financially. Readers wanted to know, advertisers liked the prestige that high-quality reporting brought, and the publications made plenty of money.

Occasionally a wiseass would say something like, "The box scores are paying for the Baghdad bureau," and we thought, Well, maybe that cross-subsidy exists, maybe it doesn't--but the whole package seems to be doing just fine.

The Internet blew apart the package and eliminated the cross-subsidy. Now readers can go to ESPN and get box scores, and they can go to a separate site to get news. Sports scores no longer subsidize the foreign correspondent, and the comics no longer support the city hall reporter.

This has led us to confront the ugly reality of just how lousy--financially speaking--many of our journalistic projects were. Media managers can now produce a profit-and-loss statement not only for the news division as a whole, but for each reporter--and each piece of content. Managers have mostly concluded that volume--getting reporters to do faster stories and more of them--generates a better P&L outcome. Articles that take a few days to report, let alone a few weeks or months, rarely have a positive return on investment.

In a world where each piece of content has to earn its own way, we end up with more listicles ("The 10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List") (yes, that list actually exists) and fewer reporters covering the sewer commission. ProPublica, a nonprofit online news organization, once estimated that it had cost them about $750,000 to do their expose on the health hazards of acetaminophen. To attract enough ad revenue to pay for itself, the project would have had to generate about 100 million monetizable page views. The entire (superb, Pulitzer Prizewinning) ProPublica site hasn't generated that many page views cumulatively over the past five years.

This pattern has led many media analysts, including myself, to worry that certain types of reporting--especially reporting that takes real time and money to complete--would simply have no business model. Recently, however, I've been pleasantly surprised at a few efforts to...