From The Atlantic:
It’s not that Mark Zuckerberg set out to dismantle the news business when he founded Facebook 13 years ago. Yet news organizations are perhaps the biggest casualty of the world Zuckerberg built.
There’s reason to believe things are going to get worse.
A sprawling new manifesto by Zuckerberg, published to Facebook on Thursday, should set off new alarm bells for journalists, and heighten news organizations’ sense of urgency about how they—and their industry—can survive in a Facebook-dominated world.
Facebook’s existing threat to journalism is well established. It is, at its core, about the flow of the advertising dollars that news organizations once counted on. In this way, Facebook’s role is a continuation of what began in 1995, when Craigslist was founded. Its founder, Craig Newmark, didn’t actively aim to decimate newspapers, but Craigslist still eviscerated a crucial revenue stream for print when people stopped buying newspaper classifieds ads.
Craigslist was the first signal (and became the prototypical example) of a massive unbundling of news services online that would diminish the power and reach of the news, culturally, and make it more difficult to produce a profitable news product.
Zuckerberg’s memo outlines a plan for the next phase of this unbundling, and it represents an expansion of Facebook’s existing threat to the news industry.
Facebook already has the money. The company is absolutely dominating in the realm of digital advertising. It notched $8.8 billion in revenue last quarter—more than $7 billion of which came from mobile-ad sales. One analyst told The New York Times last year that 85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.
Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.
. . . .
In the past, the deaths of news organizations have jeopardized the prospect of a safe, well-informed, civically-engaged community. One 2014 paper found a substantial drop-off in civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver from 2008 to 2009, after both cities saw the closure of longstanding daily newspapers. (In Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer halted its print edition, but continued to produce online news; In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News folded.) Lee Shaker, an assistant professor of communications at Portland State University and the author of the 2014 study, found that the decline was “not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper,” suggesting that the decline in civic engagement may be attributed to disappearance of local news sources. (The effects in Denver, where 20 percent of the population had subscribed to the shuttered Rocky Mountain News, were especially pronounced.)
. . . .
News organizations provide the basis for public action by building and strengthening community ties, “so, if local media institutions are strong and are binding individuals and groups together, then citizens should be participating in more community groups, contacting their government more frequently, and circulating more petitions because they are more aware of shared problems, interests, and opportunities,” Shaker wrote.
Zuckerberg obviously understands this. “Research suggests reading local news is directly correlated with local civic engagement,” he wrote in his manifesto. “This shows how building an informed community, supportive local communities, and a civically-engaged community are all related.”
The problem is that Zuckerberg lays out concrete ideas about how to build community on Facebook, how to encourage civic engagement, and how to improve the quality and inclusiveness of discourse—but he bakes in an assumption that news, which has always been subsidized by the advertising dollars his company now commands, will continue to feed into Facebook’s system at little to no cost to Facebook.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
I just read a slew of aggregators from here and abroad. I used to read/listen to a spectrum of biased sources too (from Pravda and Radio Moscow to Soldier of Fortune) but decided it was fun but too much time teasing out truth from the mix. I like to see what people are talking about out in the wider world.
I find the Nikkei web site and the Economist pretty useful. Their business bias is obvious but for the most part they are careful not to take sides in the US Culture Wars which is what is really killing the mainstream media in the US.
I’m watching journalists destroy Pewdiepie, and my hatred for the media continues to grow. I get better news off the tabloids and Coast to Coast than I do ANY of the major news outlets. I guess because with the tabloids, I’m expecting 80% to be lies and sensationalism?
I have heard the Cleveland Plain Dealer is good. I used to read the L.A. Times, they seemed okay then. The Honolulu papers merged so there’s only one, but it isn’t bad.
The island newspaper here is lame, but its a small town island so we have a small town paper… (total population is 67,000 or so, largest town in the county is 9400-ish, exactly one main road, which runs around the island mostly within 3-5 miles of the coast). Not a hotbed of investigative journalism.
Al the Small Town Resident
The Plain Dealer is pretty decent, mostly because they stay neutral on partisan politics. When they endorse candidates it is on their resume and competence rather than on hot button issues.
But then, they have to: northeast ohio is divided country.
(They also have a decent website focused on local news.)
Downtown Cleveland and the near east side suburbs are loyally democrat but the west side and the rest of the region is center to right. There’s pockets here and therd but you have to go to the Pennsylvania border (Youngstown) or south to Columbus to find another Democrat stronghold.
There’s no net money in partisan pandering in the midwest.
Destroying newspapers has been done by the newspapers themselves.
After I learned how the NY Times manipulates ‘best-seller’ lists, how it peeled off children’s books because Rowling was dominating the lists, and how easy it is to scam the lists if you want to pay the money to companies which artificially make it appear your book is popular, I lost all respect for the paper and its book section and the ‘professional’ revewers working there.
That’s only the section I have some knowledge of – I assume they do the same with the rest of the paper, because why would I assume anything else?
And when they destroyed this country by their contortions to make candidates appear somehow equivalent when the truth was the level of lying was epic on one side, whatever smidgen of respect I had left for them was destroyed.
Now, when I see their ads wanting me to support their ‘journalism’ as the only bulwark against the storm, I can’t even fathom how they have the chutzpah to write those ads.
The only one I have some respect for any more is the Washington Post – because they are adding reporters (and, frankly, because Bezos bought it, whether he’s interfering much or not).
The others are just not my sources of information any more.
There is clearly a need for an alternative to Facebook … just one look at Kboards where authors can see how Facebook refuses to show people their posts even after people have specifically liked and asked to get their posts, all so Facebook can extract ad dollars … shows how fundamentally dishonest and dangerous the site is.
The problem is that people like having one site to visit and catch up on their friends’ activities and right now, Facebook is the only game in town that counts. Honestly, much as I loathe Facebook, I don’t see anybody else angling to come in and take that space of “personal relationships and communication.”
I get most of my news from the web and stuff I find on aggregator sites … but boy, I seem to be in the minority for that.
I’m the same. I refuse to join Facebook because of the way they limit and control what you see.
A nineteen yo recently told me she and her friends hate Facebook, but everyone uses it because there isn’t anything else like it. Everyone belongs to it. I think that will change eventually.
There is an algorithm that tries to guess what you want to see most and puts it at the top of your newsfeed. If it literally just posted everything in the order it was posted, from all of the average FB user’s friends, most of us would only see about 20% of the posts anyway.
Don’t forget, you can always just go to the wall of every single one of your friends, and see what they posted. Its not being hidden from us.
…shows how fundamentally dishonest and dangerous the site is.
Dishonest? How much are those people paying for the services they don’t get?
I heard or read a rumor that FB is beginning to fizzle. Has anyone else come across that one? Any opinions?
I didn’t watch it, but someone on another site claimed that hardly any ads at the Superbowl mentioned Facebook or Twitter any more, and just had URLs to their own sites. That may be an indication of Facebook being on the way out.
Beginning to fizzle? It’s doubled its active users in less than 2 years (almost 2 billion people are using it now) and it’s grown its reach in more countries.
I’ve certainly heard anecdotally that young people are moving to Snapchat, Instagram, and other platforms. Facebook engagement was down in 2016 versus 2015, according to this report: http://marketingland.com/report-facebook-activity-influencer-marketing-206570 .
My 14-year-old daughter has never used Facebook. She prefers both Snapchat and Instagram for staying connected with her friends.
Best way to dissuade teenagers from using a social space is for parents to show up. 🙂
Teens like that their activity disappears after 10 seconds with Snapchat.
We have been hearing FB is failing ever since the IPO.
And yet, I NEVER look to Facebonk for news. Zuckerberg has never made any pretense of objectivity or universality (you cannot depend on everyone seeing your posts on FB, they deliberately do not forward to all your friends).
I just don’t understand any of the folks who claim FB is a news source… you get better coverage from Fox, with its built in bias, than you do from FB.
In re: journalistic credibility. When a reporter uses soybean video when talking about corn prices and a Hereford when talking about milk prices, the viewers know exactly how concerned an organization is about getting facts correct.
I don’t mind seeing the newspapers go the way of the dinosaur, but facebook is equally scary with their ability (and willingness) to suppress things that don’t match their world view.
Anyone who relies on Facebook to tell them about the real world is doomed anyway.
thou hast said it, Edward M Grant
couldnt be more true
The problem is that many, MANY people now get their news from Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has created the instrument that we’ve seen in all those dystopian future novels: The computer that tells you how to think. It gives you the “news” it thinks you want to see based on the pages and posts that you like, your circle of friends, and the groups you are a part of. You don’t see all the news anymore. At least with a newspaper you had the choice of leafing past things you weren’t interested in, and stopping if it caught your eye. You won’t have that chance on FB.
Say hello to the future of thought control.
tho costly, the news ought be massively investigative… as once it was long long ago
And impartial, something it never was but now pretends to be.
I long for impartial, investigative news.
With investigative reporting, evidence comes first, and facts and conclusions follow.
Today, the facts and conclusions come first, and the evidence doesn’t matter.
That would require financial support. Which they aren’t getting.
The WP hired 20 new people to cover Trump. Lots of money. We didn’t see much in the way of investigative reporting.
Lots of the investigative reporting we have seen recently has been dead wrong.
Money isn’t the problem. The people are.
I think journalists have destroyed “Journalism” all on their own. When was the last time any journalist did some fact checking? I only noticed it because of local news that made national headlines because they twisted the truth.
Once you lose credibility….
Yes. Even ten years ago, people might have cared about the loss of the old news media. But they’ve so discredited themselves in the last few years that most will just shrug.
The only newspaper I care about is our local one. Because it actually contains useful news.
Alas, local news round my neck of the woods is no better than the “big boys”. When they’re not outright wrong on the facts they are wrong on presentation; everything gets slanted and reads more like op eds than straight reporting.
Same here. Our local paper is useless. We’ve come to rely on a private social network with real time postings about events in our neighborhood and city.
It’s pretty hit or miss around the country/world, but my local paper is pretty good. My hometown though, where I grew up, it’s pretty bad.
“Craigslist was the first signal (and became the prototypical example) of a massive unbundling of news services online that would diminish the power and reach of the news, culturally, and make it more difficult to produce a profitable news product.”
Key words: “power” and “profitable”.
There’s a connection in there in the form of a third key word; credibility. And that is where the “news” media is suffering the worst.
As their various anti-Amazon screeds have highlighted in recent years, the more they try to assert power these days, the less credible they become to the extent that a recent university poll found them less credible than the POTUS. Only 39% of registered voters thought the media was truthful.
That might have something to do with the move towards Facebook and other channels.
Me, I’m finding a better balance of news at MSN than at any of the network news sites or the WP app. And MSN is just a free aggregator.
Agreed, the news is for idiots. The more news you watch, the dumber you are. Information discovery and filter bubbles, etc, are all real problems, but the news has never solved them. Watching more news will only make you dumber.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed. –Mark Twain
You must have read that in a newspaper, because Mark Twain never said it.
I recently saw that coming from Denzel Washington:
http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/denzel-washington-media-if-you-read-newspaper-youre-misinformed
Mark Twain quotes on the internet are a fantastic example of what the problem is with getting your news from Facebook links.