Editors are chasing more readers for less money, and the way to make money is to attract as many readers and keep them on the site so they can soak up the ads. It doesn’t have to be lowest common denominator journalism—the Guardian is trying to become a global site for serious English-speaking readers—but most of the time it is. In America, Gawker, a tabloid site, and Forbes, a once serious business journal, are taking the logic of the new publishing economy to its obvious conclusion. They determine writers’ pay by how many unique visitors they bring in. At Gawker, managers tell trainees they will receive $5 per 1,000 unique monthly visitors—up to $6,000 maximum per month. If the hopefuls meet their targets after three months, they will allow them to stay. If they don’t, they’re out. The results are predictable. The last time I looked, the top piece on the Gawker site was: “What Happened to the Runner Who Shit [sic] Himself During a Half-Marathon?”

The system turns journalists into thieves and liars. Not the traditional journalistic frauds in the Jayson Blair/Johann Hari mould but liars who lie because lying is a corporate imperative. To get traffic, fewer and fewer news sites can afford to send out writers to find original content. So they steal from other news sites, or lift and repackage a YouTube video or Twitter exchange that may go viral.

In a confessional piece that deserved far more attention than it received, Luke O’Neil, a Boston journalist, described in Esquire how “the churn-and-burn pace of daily writing has led to my passing along some pretty sketchy nonsense”. He would steal and rebrand anything that might catch the passing reader: a preacher feeling up a waitress in an American café, a comedian who live-tweeted a break-up on an apartment roof, anything whatsoever about celebrities without  checking whether the stories were true.

He wanted the traffic. His employers wanted the traffic. Without the traffic, they had no income. If checking might endanger a story, then he wouldn’t check because he knew that if he didn’t steal the story someone else would take it, rewrite it and find a headline that would draw in passing trade. “That’s the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, ViralNova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out,” O’Neil concluded. “You don’t need to write any more—just write a good headline and point.”

You simply cannot describe what follows as journalism. There’s no original research and no original thought. The next logical step is for web companies to look at your preferences and interests and give you what they think you want if that is what it takes to keep you on their sites.  They will customise news as they already customise advertisements.  Google says that the company wants to look at your consumption of news, your search patterns, your mail and your posts, anticipate your intellectual and emotional wishes, and give you work which matches them, so that you need not read anything that would tax, unsettle or surprise you.

This is a dumbed-down future Daily Mail pundits should rail against. Except, of course, they can’t. Their editors would fire them.