1. Perils of Pageview

Much of what we know, or think we know, about what is happening in the world we learn by reading the news. But nowadays “the news” means something different than it did in generations past. What we read primarily today are articles on the internet—everything ranging from casual blog posts to meticulously researched stories on national and international news sites. The transition of journalism from print to screen does not inherently mean what we read is less truthful than it used to be. However, this technological transformation has enabled a less overt but nonetheless extraordinarily influential economic transformation: the datafication of the journalism industry. The pageviews and clicks we all sprinkle across the internet are, as I will discuss, the digital fertilizer feeding a burgeoning garden of misinformation and fake news. By tracing the financial incentives involved in the contemporary news cycle, I hope in this chapter to convey the alarming extent that data, unseen to most of us yet created by our actions and activities, is fundamentally shaping what we read every day and threatening the bulwark of traditional journalistic standards.