What kerfuffle might that be? Any of them. My Twitter feed is lighting up with reference to an article on “Should More Black Women Marry Outside the Race?” but last week, wasn’t the furor about romance readers and porn, or women basically being children, or young adult books eating souls? Truthfully, the shocking WSJ Online articles have all run together in my mind at this point.

Every time a new kerfuffle starts, though, there’s a common outraged question: Why? Why are we still talking about this? Why would anyone think that? Why is this completely un-qualified person being given the opportunity to spout their weird opinions as science?

So, I’m going to explain why today’s kerfuffle happened.

1) Moreso than any other website, the large online news organizations rely on pageviews and unique visitors as a measure of success. This is because it directly affects revenue in two ways: 1) there’s a small revenue that literally comes with each visitor who sees the ads and 2) high visitor counts lets the organization tout themselves as a major news hub, therefore charging more per visitor than another generalist site with no reputation to speak of. Short term, an angry, disagreeing pageview is worth just as much money as an edified one. And angry people drop by, tell their friends, and leave comments at a much higher rate than any other category of person, from the bored but game right up to the truly impressed by brilliant journalism.

2) Ad-wise, the daily kerfuffle doesn’t necessarily make them money. Targeted ads on a crazed race wtf piece probably have a fairly low payoff–but they’ll have other articles, hidden down in their structure, probably three years old, talking about how to choose the best houseware gadget or how to sue someone for your horrible cancer, which make really big bucks per visitor. They’ll also have current events articles when something truly newsworthy comes out, that can literally bring millions of visits since EVERYONE is searching for info on the royal wedding or school shooting. They just need to get their article on the first page of results in the major search engines, and they will make hundreds of thousands of dollars off this one article. Links to those non-offensive articles are the single biggest way to push their articles higher in search results, but further down the list, total links to the entire site are a big help. There are SEO guys who have wet dreams at the idea of 300 people on Twitter and 100 people on Facebook and 20 people on blogs linking to their article. And angry links are worth just as much as non-angry links. Well, there’s more to that. Google might have some tricks up their sleeve there, but that’s advanced SEO that I don’t follow much lately. But really? Angry links are still worth a damn lot.

3) Modern news agencies trying to make a living online are mostly frazzled messes. They’re usually a subsidiary of a giant public company which plays by the numbers, and demands profit, yet they themselves are usually (fairly) small with quite a few freelancers doing the writing for as cheap as possible (or free). Either they look for leadership to personalities who’ve made it big online, usually through properties that were never known for their journalistic integrity or traditional journalism at all, or they try to keep the leadership that did well for them as a traditional news agency and are left going “wtf, why hasn’t our reputation helped us here AT ALL?!?”. If the concept of baiting page views by trashing their reputation to pump up visitors by an extra 100k and revenue by an extra 10k this quarter sounds desperate, that’s because print-to-online shifting news agencies are desperate. Plus there’s that guy saying the links from this months 10k could make them another 100k next quarter if they just hit it big.

4) Public companies don’t have consciences. They might have morals–a mission statement, some ignored-in-spirit rules about content–but if they break their own morals, the company doesn’t have a feeling of collective guilt. They just fire the guy most responsible. Or applaud him because he had good numbers. Guilt is always a solitary endeavor, haunting someone long after they quit the company in question, but not haunting the business at all.

So, the only real downsides to publishing inflammatory, ignorant and/or insulting content are reputation hit and guilt, and neither of them matter here. Much like with training dogs, attention is always encouragement for the WSJ Online (and other such organizations).