I Don't Know, Somebody

Guess who isn't named in this headline or blurb?

The fact that Billy Evans, the person who is actually running this new startup, called Haemanthus, isn't actually named in the article until the third paragraph demonstrates what I suspect most people already know about this story: It's not about Mr. Evans, or his company. It's about hoping that a front-page story about Elizabeth Holmes is still enough to drive clicks. Theranos is called out in the URL, and the story's only tags are "elizabeth holmes" and "theranos," even though the story is allegedly not about them.

Except for the fact that it is about them. Only a few paragraphs at the end of the piece directly deal with Haemanthus, and the technology it's working on, information gleaned from a January patent filing and anonymous supposed "sources," who are the stereotypical "people who allegedly know something but shouldn't be talking to the media about it and whose motives are completely opaque to the reader." But the bulk of the story is little more than a rehashing of earlier stories. In other words, it could have been a link.

National Public Radio, like any other outlet, pushes stories like these because, in the end, they work. I'm willing to bet that most of the clicks on this story came from people looking to see what new dirt had been unearthed on Ms. Holmes, or to make sure they stayed far away from whatever the "new biotech testing startup" turned out to be.

And this is the fundamental problem with the media in general. For all of the high-minded rhetoric and lofty ambitions, in the end, news is a business, and when subscriptions aren't mandatory (as they can't be when the "news" is more about entertainment than usable information) it pays for itself by gathering attention by any means necessary.