• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, February 4, 2011

Among the more frightening takeaways from SAI's Business Insider publication  of the "The AOL Way," a document to train editors, are these:

Editors are instructed to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.

In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.

If your primary consideration for the value of information is how many links it will produce,  how much money it can make, and how fast you can get it done, then the results can't in any way be considered journalism, in the form that we have grown up with it. It is more like pandering to the lowest common denominator in hope that whatever trash you throw out there goes "viral" -- as if that is somehow validation of the quality of your efforts.

Editors (well, real editors classically trained in the craft of journalism) have long struggled with the knowledge that much of what they cover can have little appeal to parts of their audience. But because these were important stories necessary to inform the populace so that they could better understand breaking news or trends, editors published them anyway. For example, I recall that Newsweek editors knew that stories on the economy were a killer since they were hard to illustrate, especially on the cover, and potential newsstand buyers disappeared for a week. Yet, it was important to take the pulse of the economy -- especially when it was moving quickly in one direction or the other. Newspapers nationwide faced the same dilemma.

The British tabloids threw in the towel years ago, knowing that big-breasted women or scandal on the front page helps lift sales far more than stories about the critical issues of the day. When the newsweeklies put ice cream or Pilates on their covers in a transparent attempt to attract readers, they lost all remaining credibility.

No one has yet accused AOL of being a news organization, but they have hired scores of former journalists to try and revive its fortunes. Why bother? Just hire a bunch of frat boys to get high, surf the Net for outrageous stories and videos and repurpose those. Sort of an online Tosh.0. No matter that this will just add to the onslaught of electronic noise documented this week by USA Today.

The world is too rapidly becoming about back links and traffic at the expense of editorial judgment and quality reporting. I am not sure I want the "click vote" of the Internet to decide what the important stories are. With that model -- seemingly the new AOL model -- you no longer have an experienced editor with a long memory and insider knowledge helping you separate the wheat from the chaff.

With nothing but chaff to read, we might be more entertained, but will grow stupider by the day.