“Deanna is going to say a few words about traffic and goals,” Rich said, as the room applauded, and Katya realized she had completely zoned out for the past few minutes.
Deanna came to the front of the room. She was a small woman with frizzy black hair that she usually wore in a bun at the top of her head, and her outfits always looked like they could have walked off the set of Reality Bites. Today she was wearing a long-sleeved black baby-doll dress, purple tights, and black Doc Martens boots. Her nails were painted bright pink. She looked like a Goth elf. Deanna dressed like she had been shopping in Urban Outfitters since the early ’90s and just never saw the need to go anywhere else. She lived with her wife, a music teacher, and their two kids in a brownstone in Prospect Heights, where they’d hosted last summer’s TechScene barbecue in their backyard.
“So, traffic.” Deanna’s voice was low and a little raspy. She was older than Rich, but no one knew exactly how old she was. Katya figured she could be anywhere between thirty-two and forty-two. “Great week. Overall we broke three million uniques, which was our best week since WWDC.” WWDC was the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the annual event where Apple unveiled new products and the tech journalism world exploded; it was an all-hands-on-deck situation, with everyone in the office covering various aspects of the conference. This year had been Katya’s first and she had written five posts in one day, more than anyone else on the team. “And we’re beating Mashable and BizWorld for the month on Twitter mentions and retweets.” The room applauded.
“So. Yes,” Deanna said, trying to speak above everyone and mostly failing. “Good job, everyone, but the month’s not over.” The room quieted down. Deanna smiled. “Thank you. I also wanted to say a few words about how we’ll be evaluating things going forward.” She cleared her throat. “Up until now, we’ve been primarily focused on traffic. And traffic’s good. Traffic’s great, in fact. We love traffic. But traffic can be cheap. Traffic can be fickle. Traffic is not always your friend.” The room laughed, a little nervously. “Along with Dan, Rich and I have been coming up with a new metric to measure success that takes into account not just traffic, but also things like Twitter mentions and inbound links. In other words, how influential is your work? How are you driving the conversation?” Dan caught Katya’s eye and raised an eyebrow as if to say, See?
“So what does this mean for you?” Deanna continued. “Well, it means that original reporting, even if it doesn’t get as much traffic as, say, Thirteen Things You Never Knew Your iPhone Could Do—great post, by the way, Brian—is going to be more important. We want you on the phone, we want you meeting sources for lunch. We want to be breaking news all over the place. And when I say breaking news, I don’t mean being the first person on the internet to post news from a press release or a statement, or from a conference, or panel, or whatever. We’re talking something that you break yourself.”
Rich spoke up again. “Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that things around here are going to change. We’ll still be the awesome tech news site we’ve always been.” He grinned, but Katya could practically see her colleagues’ minds racing. So many of them thought that news meant posting something that another site already had with the words slightly rearranged and a different headline. Well, they were in for a rude awakening. But how would Deanna and Rich assess impact, exactly? They hadn’t really addressed that. It seemed subjective in a way that made Katya nervous. At least with traffic, the raw numbers were right there for everyone to see; there was no questioning them, no way for someone to make the case that actually, no, they deserved another twenty thousand views or Facebook shares or whatever. The traffic was what it was. She didn’t even really understand how journalists functioned in the days before you could see exactly how many people were reading your stuff. If something was just buried in the middle of a magazine, who cared how many people subscribed to the magazine? You had no idea how many people were actually reading your story. Katya thought this would have driven her absolutely crazy. She also didn’t understand people—true, mostly old people—who bemoaned the quantification of journalism. If the whole point was to have people reading your stuff, wouldn’t you want to know how many people were doing that? They were just scared, she decided, to know how few people were actually reading their work, so it was easier just to criticize the whole endeavor.
Maybe that was a good enough reason to go after the Mack story—to show everyone she worked with, and everyone in the industry, that she was not to be fucked with, that she would go after the tough stories even if they might make some people feel bad.
“Thanks, everyone,” Rich said, and everyone started talking again, a low murmur that felt more charged than usual. And—fuck, this presented a whole host of other problems related to the picture on her phone. And what Sabrina had or hadn’t told Dan. She needed to be alone to think, but Dan was making a beeline for her.
“Everything okay?” he said.
Ugh, I must look upset, she thought. She smiled quickly. “Yeah, everything’s fine, why?”
“Just thought you looked a little…I don’t know. Never mind. Want a smoke?”
“Yeah—just let me run to the bathroom,” she said. Dan nodded and walked toward the front door. Katya scurried to the bathroom and, once safely in a stall, pulled up the picture of Mack’s text again. She just needed to make sure it was still there.
11
House of Cards