BOB GARFIELD: Last month, writers at the monthly magazine Business 2.0 all got new jobs. Mind you, they're still expected to do their old jobs, filing stories for the print edition, but now they'll be blogging as well.

No big deal there. As readers move online, publishers will follow. But here's the interesting part. Instead of giving the writers a little more each week in the paycheck for the extra work, the publishers decided to start paying them based on the number of readers who visit their blogs. The more traffic they get, the bigger their cut of the ad revenue raised by the blogs.

Clearly, it's a business model that gives writers new incentive for good writing. But does it threaten journalistic integrity in the process? The magazine's editor, Josh Quittner, doesn't think so, and he joins me now to explain why. Josh, welcome to the show.

JOSH QUITTNER: Thanks. It's great to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: For decades, the press has worked very hard to construct these impregnable firewalls between editorial operations and the business side, explicitly to protect the sanctity of the editorial product from any taint of commercial influence. Tell me why this scheme at Business 2.0 doesn't tear down that firewall.

JOSH QUITTNER: Ah, but that's exactly the point. I mean, the beauty of this new medium is my guys don't know who's advertising on their pages. I don't know who's advertising on their pages. I doubt if anyone at CNN Money, which is the overall website that will be hosting us, knows who specifically is advertising on any single blog.
It's utterly pure. It's utterly innocent. We all are in the business of serving a reading public, and it makes no sense to put together media that isn't interesting to people.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, let me ask you about what people find interesting, because, I mean, to cite a couple of examples, one more extreme than the other, the Sports Illustrated biggest issue of the year is the swimsuit issue, which, of course, has absolutely zero to do with sports and a whole lot to do with staring at nearly-naked women. National Enquirer and Star have much bigger circulations than The Atlantic Monthly.
Will there not be a temptation for your bloggers to just go for the sort of lowest common denominator and to hit on subjects that are pandering to the readers' baser interests, more down-market, even more sensational?

JOSH QUITTNER: No, absolutely not, because if my writers start to write about things that are off topic, that are of no interest to a business readership, people won't come back. The Web is a very self-correcting place. And, don't forget, I still function as an editor here, and part of the deal with my people is I'm reading everything that gets posted.

BOB GARFIELD: There are certain things a blogger can do to maximize traffic, things like getting other bloggers to link to your own blog or using specific words that will likely get a higher blog rating in Google searches and other search engines.

If there is a financial incentive just to generate traffic, what's to keep your journalists from rigging the game to get more hits as opposed to finding a, you know, more important story?

JOSH QUITTNER: Well, first of all, I don't think it's easy to, as you put it, rig the game. There's something like 75,000 new blogs being created every day. You know, everyone talks about how this is an attention economy, how you're competing for people's attention. It's not easy to rig that.

However, on the cover of Business 2.0, the magazine that's about to come out, is real estate. And why am I doing real estate? Well, I've done real estate two years in a row now, and it's my best-selling cover. People are really, really interested in real estate.

Does that make me a dishonest editor because I'm putting real estate on the cover? Absolutely not. It's a real interesting business story. That's why it sells so well.

BOB GARFIELD: I've spent many years in the newspaper business, and whenever I've written a story that, let's say, is confrontational in some way, and the story subject says, aw, you guys just want to sell papers, I've always been able to come back with, what, you think I get a commission? Your bloggers will no longer have that out.

JOSH QUITTNER: You're supposing that there's only one kind of journalism. You're supposing that there's only newspapers. And if there were only newspapers, I would completely agree with you. If you, as a newspaper reporter, were monetized based on the number of people who read your story, then you'd be absolutely right.

But the newspaper model is based on something that's very, very different from what's going on online. The blogosphere is all about the Talmudic commentary on the text, the text in this case being the highly-polished professional pieces that appear in print, on television, on radio.

What I'm trying to do here with my folks, who put out a monthly magazine, is allow them to play in both worlds. It allows them to think entrepreneurially. It allows them to mix it up on a daily, hour-to-hour basis with their sources and live in a world of commentary and instant analysis, while, at the same time, becoming better at what they do and bringing those ideas back to the magazine, where they will practice the age-old profession of journalism and go out and report and polish and produce something that becomes the text.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Josh. Thank you very much. I'm going to give you a qualified good luck on this one.

JOSH QUITTNER: I'll take that as a qualified thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Josh Quittner is the editor of Business 2.0 magazine.