How the internet works: (Part of) a theory

Today I tweeted a link to a Mother Jones interactive that was retweeted 13 times. Now that’s a lot for me. Yeah whatever, I’m not that funny. But what does that mean? It means, and hopefully I’m not merely being self-deprecating here, but I think it means that the good folks at Mother Jones (and their various crowd of liberal followers) are very active on Twitter. Not that Mother Jones isn’t awesome, Mother Jones is actually quite awesome. The level of their activity (particularly in social media) is rivaled only by Mitt Romney’s campaign staff anytime his wife says the word “unzip.” When trying to make myself believe that Twitter and social media are journalism’s saving grace — I keep running into the same, formidable, brick wall. The cliche about the tree falling in the forest is very fitting for old-school media organizations floundering in today’s current media environment. Many media outlets are out there publishing story after story that have drawn so little buzz and attention, that it’s eerily like a tree falling in the forest that no one saw, so it may as well not have happened. We’re not talking a 500-word, pithy write-up on what Facebook employees are going to do with their seven- and eight-figure paychecks, I’m talking about projects that can sometimes represent over 12 months of work for multiple full-time employees. Massive, groundbreaking investigations spread across many articles, images, and sometimes videos or data-intensive interactives — that can sometimes gather as fewer than 5,000 pageviews.

When you’re talking traffic that low, for those that are lame enough to know, that mother-effing huge tree basically crashed in the forest destroying everything in the nearby vicinity without a single solitary soul there to watch it come down. These are great findings, but for one reason or another, it can often feel as though no one was able to see, let alone act on the grand atrocities that were just reported.

So what I’m waiting to see the internet figure out is, how items of mass appeal and relevance can go unnoticed by the vast majority of the population. The issue leaves me with a lot of questions. Is the internet even a good platform for spreading mass awareness? If not, how long will it take to get to that stage? Can we ever expect the poorest of the poor, and the weakest of the weak to be on the internet? Comparatively, it’s the cheapest means of mass mobilization mankind has ever seen, but does it actually reach all people? Perhaps the media is too far out of touch? Or perhaps people just are bored to tears by every word published on these less-than-viral websites? I mean, that last one can’t be true. One time, our resident health care expert wrote about the Hunger Games.

Allow me to get back to my Mother Jones tweet from today, and how it was overwhelmingly more popular than anything I’ve tweeted before. Now after nearly a year in a fairly big newsroom, in addition to earning degrees in the area, I know that social media is just like high school. It’s not necessarily about what you know, a lot more of who you know. Without getting noticed by the right crowd, it is totally and completely possible for all sorts of egregious, mind-blowing, world-altering crap to happen and show up on the internet every day that literally no one sees. Food blogs exist, so you know that’s true.

There’s very little that one can control in the world of online publishing. Especially little if you aren’t willing to compromise on what stories you tell, or how you tell them. What you do have a menial amount of say in is which forest your tree falls in. Find one with people. Lots of people. A campground would be ideal. But particularly important people who care.

More on that, later.